What if the greatest threat to mankind isn’t some soon-to-be-discovered lethal pathogen, but something already here, known, and soon-to-be unleashed? This is the set-up for Cold Storage Jonny Campbell’s sci-fi splatter film adapted from the novel by David Koepp, famed screenwriter of Jurrassic Park, Spider-Man, and Panic Room to name a few.
Like Michael Crichton before him, Koepp imbibes his script with a touch of sci-fi realism, kicking things off with the 1979 Skylab incident where parts of America’s first space station crashed down into the Indian Ocean and Australia. From there a 00’s SOS from a rural outback town summons Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), and Dr Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) who find the town ravaged by a highly aggressive alien fungus which came from the space debris and killed everyone. After bombing the site, Nesson and co take a sample of the fungus to be stored in an underground facility where it is forgotten for years and eventually covered by a storage warehouse. It gets out and two juvenile warehouse workers (Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery) have to deal with the aftermath.
Its body horror but with a hefty dose of schlock, keeping it on the tonal polar to recent fungi horrors like The Last of Us or 2008’s Splinter (a superb piece of infection horror). Koepp’s spore doesn’t make bloodthirsty monster of its infected, it just wants to spread like any decent parasitic threat via bombastic bodily explosions of bright green goop.
Cold Storage could have went another way though, that outback intro, where an entire town is revealed to have crawled onto their roofs and exploded, offers the film’s only moment of pure visual horror, but Koepp et all aren’t interested. This is a B-Movie, a hark back to 90’s monster movies with a bit of Goosebumps, Return of the Living Dead, and Edgar Wright thrown in. The chemistry between Keery and Campbell, that work-dubious, blue collar, rom-com flavour feels like a zoomer update of Kevin Smith. The head-popping, chest-bursting, gross content doesn’t disappoint and always hits a mark so big its fundamentally daft. Neeson’s involvement, charismatic as ever, is less tied to his Taken era and more in-line with the comedy chops of his recent Naked Gun reboot.
The only problem with Campbell and Koepp’s contemporary B-Movie is that there should have been more. Horror vet Richard Brake turns up for a few scenes as a scowling military adversary of Neeson’s but never delivers the big villain goods. Vanessa Redgrave (Neeson’s mother-in-law) potters in for a few minutes and never quite gets to round off the emotional promise of her set-up. Lesley Manville who gets similarly sidelined even with great on-screen chemistry with Neeson. The explosion of chaos and action the film is steaming towards comes too late, crammed into the final 15 minutes.
In the world of formidable fungi films, Cold Storage doesn’t offer the parasitic paranioa of the genre’s scariest, nor does it offer the rounded well-written best of Koepp’s career. What it does offer is tongue in cheek, if a little plastic, easy fun. Cold Storage won’t impress hardened horror fans, but will be an easy hit for younger audiences and folks just wanting goofy fun.
3/5
Scott Clark
Dir. Jonny Campbell
Stars. Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson, Leslie Manville,
