The Lair was another fairly blind rental… but I was immediately intrigued when Neil Marshall’s name came up in the opening credits. Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and even the uneven Doomsday… plus the last thing I saw him make was the Watchers on the Wall (battel of The Wall) episode of Game of Thrones. This is a man with great pulp sci-fi/horror tendencies who always seems to have more ambition than he does budget. And The Lair is pretty much par for that course.

The Lair is about a fighter pilot shot down over Afghanistan. She winds up chased into an old bunker left over from the Soviet invasion… where she encounters mutant enemies. She has to escape, meet up with allies, and fend off the ravenous beasties.

I’ll be pretty blunt here… there’s a lot that’s kind of laughable about this movie. It’s creatures are practical but generic men in suits, the limited CGI is uniformly bad, and the dialog is often cliché and cringe. There’s a lot of red flags in the first half hour of this flick that I can see anyone walking away without bothering to watch the rest.

But there’s a point during the first siege sequence where I realized this was the Neil Marshall who directed Dog Soldiers and that episode of Game of Thrones. He just (ironically) didn’t have the same budget. But his hand and eye for crafting cool action scenes was present. Even though he’s laden down with a bad script and Power Rangers bad guys, he’s still putting together an exciting sequence.

And the movie gets better from there… it never stops being borderline, but damn if I wasn’t having some good old fashioned creature feature fun. A good bit of pulpy sci-fi/action without a brain cell to spare but plenty of hutzpah, plenty of ambition, budget be damned.

I don’t think everyone’s gonna love this or even like it… it’s got obvious problems but the underpinnings are solid. If you like a good fun creature feature with some solid action direction but maybe not so much good along the edges, you might dig this thing.

Score: 82