By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson
Directed by Jonny Campbell
Written by David Koepp
Samuel Goldwyn Films
COLD STORAGE is one of those movies where the fewer movies like it you’ve seen before, the more you’re likely to enjoy it. Or to put it another way: I’ve seen THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and you, COLD STORAGE, are no RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.
The details are different, but the broad strokes of the story and splattery/comedic approach are similar enough that it’s hard not to make the comparison. COLD STORAGE’s characters aren’t as much fun or interesting, though, and for that matter, neither are the zombies. Or, to put it more accurately, the infected, as the grotesqueries result from a virulent fungus that fell to Earth attached to the remains of Skylab back in 1979. (I will concede that COLD STORAGE is better than fellow Skylab horror flick ALIEN PREDATORS, a.k.a. THE FALLING.)
A lengthy prologue set 18 years ago finds a trio of scientists/government agents—Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) and Dr. Hero Martins (SMILE’s Sosie Bacon)—arriving in a remote Western Australia town where some of that wreckage landed, and where the residents have all died in extremely nasty ways. They discover that fungus growing in a Skylab oxygen tank and take a sample…but also, let’s just say, a sample takes one of them. The bit they take back to the U.S. winds up in the bowels of a military base in Kansas; in the present day, the place has become a self-storage facility where Travis, nicknamed Teacake (STRANGER THINGS’ Joe Keery), is working a late-night security detail. He’s not overly happy with this gig, a requirement for his parole from an initially undisclosed crime, but he becomes a little more enthusiastic when new hire Naomi (BARBARIAN’s Georgina Campbell) joins him.
Just like in RETURN, these two employees wind up down in the lower levels of their workplace, where the biological agent (in this case the fungus) gets loose after many years in storage and begins to turn both humans and animals it comes into contact with into pustulant, green-vomiting killers. Veteran genre screenwriter David Koepp, adapting his own 2019 novel, introduces a bunch more characters as potential infectees/victims, including Naomi’s hostile ex-boyfriend Mike (Aaron Heffernan), elderly storage-unit owner Mary (Vanessa Redgrave) and some goons in cahoots with the facility’s owner Griffin (Gavin Spokes) in a stolen-goods scheme. And in the midst of it all, Quinn is alerted to this dire situation and races to the scene, guided remotely by authority-flouting NASA operator Abigail (Ellora Torchia).
None of these folks are bad company, but none of them are terribly clever or compelling either. While Keery and Campbell are affable enough and have decent chemistry, their banter doesn’t crackle as it should, and the supporting characters are neither fresh nor over-the-top enough to make much of an impression. Not to mention that a couple of the cast seem vastly overqualified. What Oscar nominee Manville is doing here is anybody’s guess, though Oscar winner Redgrave is Neeson’s former mother-in-law and lives in Italy (where COLD STORAGE was filmed), so perhaps he simply invited her along for a bit of fun. It’s too bad, then, that she’s underutilized, one good hero moment notwithstanding. As for Neeson himself, he’s dependably intense but misses the chance to pull any variations, satirical or otherwise, on his standard driven-hero persona. (Side note: His character is named Roberto Diaz in Koepp’s novel, which makes it an odd coincidence that I saw COLD STORAGE the day it was announced that Odessa A’zion dropped out of the adaptation of DEEP CUTS after initially and controversially taking a role written in that book as Latina.)
Director Jonny Campbell, a British TV veteran who also helmed 2006’s ALIEN AUTOPSY, keeps everything moving, finds a few creative ways to shoot the mayhem and makes amusing use of The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” during a sequence detailing the fungus’ spread. (On the other hand, SEND HELP beat this movie to needle-dropping Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” and did it better.) The makeup effects by Igor Studios’ Lou Elsey and Dave Elsey are impressively icky, while the CG gore is somewhat less persuasive, as are the digitally created cat and deer that take part; the closing credits inform that no real animals were used in the film, as if we need to be told. In the end, COLD STORAGE never sufficiently cuts loose, in its conception, scripting or execution, to make the kind of giggles-and-gross-out impression of its best forebears. Younger viewers who haven’t seen many of those earlier movies might get a kick out it, but more experienced fans will likely find this to be a case of been there, squeamed that.
