A band of grunts takes on mysterious underground monsters in this goofy horror movie.
Suctioning brains and snacking on innards, the monsters in “The Lair” appear motivated solely by hunger, any higher purpose remaining stubbornly veiled. Though I suppose when you’ve spent more than three decades entombed in an abandoned Soviet bunker, a good meal would be something of a priority.
Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006). The year is 2017, and Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk), a resolute Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down in a remote region of Afghanistan. Fleeing insurgents, she takes refuge in said bunker, only to face a toothy blob that has eaten one of her pursuers and ripped the face off another. Venturing deeper, she discovers pods containing more beasties in a liquid suspension. Has she found a nursery, or a laboratory?
Answers will arrive, but good luck catching them in the ensuing melee when Kate is rescued by a raggedy band of misfit soldiers that excels mainly at delivering B-movie dialogue like “Kill anything that shrieks!” Aside from Hadi Khanjanpour, as a coolheaded Afghan prisoner, the acting is pretty awful, though the script is so clunky and the characters so clichéd it’s tough to blame the performers.
If all you’re after, though, is the slap of tentacles and the spaghetti-spill of intestines — and a reminder of the alien autopsy from “The Thing” (1982) — then you won’t care that the action itself is so messy and underlighted it’s a wonder the squad kills anything except the film crew. As for the brain-sucking, by the time the credits roll you’ll probably have a fair idea what that feels like.
The Lair
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
