THE STORY – Two employees at a self-storage company have the wildest shift of their lives when a parasitic fungus that was sealed by the government escapes. As the temperature rises underground, the highly contagious and rapidly mutating microorganism starts to multiply as it unleashes its brain-controlling, body-bursting terrors on the facility’s inhabitants — human and otherwise.
THE CAST – Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Sosie Bacon, Vanessa Redgrave, Lesley Manville & Liam Neeson
THE TEAM – Jonny Campbell (Director) & David Koepp (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 99 Minutes
“PAY ATTENTION,” says the onscreen text at the opening of Jonny Campbell’s “Cold Storage”. “This shit is real.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Adapted by David Koepp from his novel of the same name, “Cold Storage” isn’t based on a real story, but rather an imagined event: What if the Skylab space station had a fast-mutating fungus onboard that survived the station’s crash to earth? And what if it was contained after eventually killing an outback neighborhood in Australia, but nearly twenty years later, the planet’s temperature had risen enough that it was able to break containment, and only one man (played by Liam Neeson) knew how to stop it? A premise full of potential for wacky B-movie hijinks as well as sociopolitical relevance, and by all accounts, that’s what the novel is. Unfortunately, something must have gotten lost in translating it to the screen, because “Cold Storage” is one cold fish of a film. Neither funny enough to be a comedy nor scary enough to be horror, the film feels like it’s waiting for the right moment to kick into high gear, but the moment never comes. Instead, it just aimlessly ambles around, not unlike the bodies infected by the film’s fungus: Occasionally exploding with a properly outrageous moment only to immediately die.
The problem begins with the ridiculously overqualified cast, nearly all of whom take the material far too seriously. The charismatic Joe Keery, as the good-hearted ex-con night security guy at the storage facility, tosses off punchlines with such nonchalance that they barely register, forcing his scene partner, the compelling Georgina Campbell, to respond in kind. Both do strong character work, but perform in a naturalistic register that doesn’t showcase the material in the strongest light. As the hardened ex-military man who fought the fungus before and now must destroy it, no matter the cost, Neeson gamely trudges through another one of his latter-day action hero roles, only this time, there’s a comedic angle – his character has a bad back. Neeson almost feels like he’s in a different film than everyone else, a much tighter sociopolitical satire that would gain relevance from his stoic line deliveries, but with a tone this dry, the satire just withers and dies on the vine. Of the cast, only Lesley Manville consistently succeeds at finding the humor within Campbell’s preferred register of muted wackiness.
But then, that phrase right there is the problem with “Cold Storage” in a nutshell. If you’re going to make a wacky movie, why mute that wackiness? Koepp’s story is very much a classic ‘50s sci-fi B-movie in modern-day clothing, so why not go all the way and embrace the wackiness at the story’s heart? The hair & makeup team certainly did, creating properly silly, gross-looking infected humans, and the visual effects team followed suit with some silly-creepy infected animal work, genuinely icky exploding bodies, and ridiculous effects sequences that track the fungus’s infection of its hosts. Unfortunately, the fun that these elements provide gets lost whenever the film has to go about the business of having its characters talk to each other about what’s happening around them. The invigorating energy of the sick creature effects simply isn’t strong enough to compensate for the overly naturalistic tone the actors adopt in their dialogue scenes.
All the ingredients for a good movie, or at the very least a fun one, are present in “Cold Storge”: A charismatic and talented ensemble, a clever story, and an overall sense of playfulness that extends from the effects work to the production design of the 24-hour self-storage facility built over the old government bunker used to contain the fungus. However, that sense of playfulness doesn’t extend to the overall tone, leaving the movie feeling like a wasted opportunity. The casting of Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave in a cameo role feels like the movie in miniature: Sure, it’s fun to see her in a silly sci-fi/horror-comedy like this, but the gravitas she brings to everything she does feels entirely misplaced in such a movie. You can see why Campbell would want to cast her, and it’s perhaps admirable to go for any restraint at all in a film like this, but it doesn’t end up working in the film’s favor.
