Blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp adapts his own 2019 novel Cold Storage for the screen. Koepp's involvement can surely be the only reason the movie has attracted actors of the calibre of Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville and Vanessa Redgrave, as it's a rather uninspired throwback to '80s b-movies, one sorely lacking the raucousness and innovative practical effects work that made those flicks so popular.
If you've seen Johannes Roberts' 2012 sci-fi thriller Storage 24, you'll be familiar with the basic setup here of characters battling some alien force in a self-storage facility. Roberts' film played its premise straight while Koepp and director Jonny Campbell have gone down the horror comedy route. Cold Storage is to Storage 24 as Return of the Living Dead is to Night of the Living Dead, but nowhere near as fun as Dan O'Bannon's cult '80s zom-com.
Neeson plays Robert Quinn, a US government agent who in a prologue is dispatched to the Australian desert where an alien fungus has escaped from a piece of debris that crash landed following the real life destruction of the Skylab space station in 1979. This opening sequence, which heavily recalls 1971's The Andromeda Strain, is the movie's highlight. Unlike the rest of the film, it plays its horror straight. A cameoing Sosie Bacon suffers a horrendous death when some of the fungus gets inside her hazmat suit, and the exploded corpses of the townsfolk litter the landscape. It sets up the sort of movie you might expect from Koepp, only for the limp comedy to be subsequently introduced.
That comes courtesy of Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery as Naomi and Travis, night shift workers at a 24-hour Kansas self-storage facility. Years earlier it was a secret government facility where a sample of the deadly fungus was locked away. When the government sold the property they seemingly forgot to inform the new owners of the potentially apocalyptic threat lurking in its bowels. Now after years of gestating, the fungus has escaped. In a nod to Dawn of the Dead, a biker gang shows up, along with Naomi's ex (Darrell D'Silva) and a dithering old lady (Redgrave), most of whom become hosts/victims of the fungi and its virus.
Though top-billed, Neeson spends most of his performance literally phoning it in as Quinn's retirement is interrupted by the news of the outbreak, which seemingly only he is able to handle. It's not until the movie's final 20 minutes that Quinn arrives at the storage facility and joins up with Naomi, Travis and his old colleague Trini (Manville). For a b-movie, Cold Storage is glacially paced, with almost an hour passing before the mayhem really breaks out. With so much of the movie focussed on the interactions between a pair of disgruntled minimum wage workers, Cold Storage plays like something Kevin Smith might make in a desperate attempt to recapture his '90s glory. Campbell and Keery have an easy-going platonic chemistry, but we never buy the movie's attempts to fashion some romantic tension between the pair. Koepp's dialogue lacks the level of wit that would justify the film spending so much time on the banter of its leads rather than getting to the splatstick action.
When that action eventually arrives it's as bloody and gooey as you expect, but the CG effects rob it of the desired impact. With heads exploding and sticky goo running amok, this would have been a dream project for the practical FX wizards of past decades. Cold Storage's action instead reminds us of all those cobbled-together AI videos on social media that attempt to evoke the '80s but completely miss the point with their digital rather than analog origins. There are dozens of straight to video '80s horror comedies with wittier dialogue, better FX and more interesting characters than Cold Storage rotting away in boxes filled with VHS tapes in self-storage facilities around the world.
Directed by: Jonny Campbell
Starring: Liam Neeson, Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville, Darrell D'Silva
