Neil Marshall is firmly in what I consider phase three of his career. Phase one would be defined as being his breakout and period between Dog Soldiers to Centurion, phase two would be his TV career, directing pilots and key episodes of
Black Sails,
Game of Thrones and
Lost in Space, and phase three would be his dive back into feature films, developing smaller scale genre vehicles for (and with) his his partner, actress Charlotte Kirk.
The first two films in this phase have been the witch trials thriller,
The Reckoning and the mutant horror actioner,
The Lair. Both have their ups and downs, but while many old school Marshall fans are unhappy with this new output, I contend that there are enough flashes of fun and moments of pure genre cinema in each that they support their own existence.
The Reckoning in particular suffers from trying to mount a period piece on a shoestring budget, but there are enough operatic moments to make it pop as a piece of cinema at times (for me anyway).
Now, apparently on a role, Marshall and Kirk are already in post-production on their next film, a crime thriller called Duchess.
The film follows a tough, working-class, petty criminal who morphs into an anti-heroine to be reckoned with in a murky underworld, in the treacherous world of diamond smuggling.
Once again Kirk leads the film and we can look forward to faces farmilliar to other Marshall films including Sam Pertwee, Colm Meany and Philip Winchester.
Check out the first images from Duchess below:
script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"> script>
Recommended Release: Centurion
