Producers: Gavin Polone and David Koepp Director: Jonny Campbell Screenplay: David Koepp Cast: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Sosie Bacon, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Brake, Aaron Heffernan, Ellora Torchia, Rob Collins, Justin Salinger, Gavin Spokes, Andrew Brooke, Darrel D’Silva, Lujza Richter and Nahel Tzegai Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Grade: C+
Periodically filmmakers get a hankering to pay homage to the B-movies they fondly recall from their youth (or from their days of binge-watching VHS tapes and DVDs, perhaps in film school). The result is a picture like this, which Jonny Campbell directs from a script by prolific screenwriter David Koepp, who adapted his own debut 2019 novel. Though you can’t be certain from the credits, it’s not implausible that one or another of them was inspired by the 1955 Hammer flick “The Creeping Unknown” (titled “The Quatermass Xperiment” in England).
Of course, the tone here is very different from Val Guest’s somber, serious sci-fi thriller. Far from being sober and monitory, Koepp and Campbell’s treatment of the premise—a gloopy extraterrestrial fungus infects humans and threatens the world—is amped-up, ultra-snarky and exuberantly over-the-top, effects-wise.
But it starts from the same basic idea, here given a spurious historical foundation. Instead of an experimental spacecraft returning to earth carrying a lone astronaut infected with the thingy, the fungus is traced to the breakup of the NASA Skylab in 1979, which resulted in some shards reaching the earth. One of them reached a small town in Australia, where a trio of researchers being dispatched to investigate in their hazmat outfits. The leader was Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon), who was accompanied by the team of Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville).
They find the locals dead, and Martins’ suit is invaded by the mutated fungus; she literally blows up as it takes her over. After a sample of the entity is removed and frozen for placement in an underground storage facility in Kansas, the town is incinerated. In the intervening years the ground-level area has been sold to a self-storage company, but the fungus remains locked underground, supposedly permanently buried (though why it was kept at all, given that no experimentation seems to have been conducted on it, is never explained).
The night staff at the place is a skeleton crew, presided over by sleazy Griffin (Gavin Spokes), who’s arranged for a biker gang of his thuggish pals to steal a bunch of big-screen TVs from a unit that night. That upsets his young subordinate Travis “Teacup” Meacham (Joe Keery), a slacker ex-con, but he’s more concerned with a strange noise he keeps hearing. He and new hire Naomi Williams (Georgina Campbell), a bright single mom, investigate and find that the sound is coming from behind a wall. They tear a hole through it and follow the beeps down to the subterranean level where the fungus sample resides behind a locked door. Unbeknownst to them, it’s a signal to military overseers indicating a temperature change in the long-dormant vault that suggests the fungus has become active.
That prompts one of the soldiers manning the army’s monitoring system (Eliora Torchia) to suggest to her pompous boss (Richard Brake) that they should contact the retired Quinn, and when he rejects the idea, she does so surreptitiously herself, using the pseudonym Abigail. Quinn immediately realizes the danger and contacts Romano for help in getting to Kansas. He’ll eventually enlist Travis and Naomi to assist in ending the threat with a modestly sized nuclear bomb, something that makes for a flashy finale.
Many filmmakers might be satisfied with that, but Koepp and Campbell load the plot up with more and more stuff. There are infected critters—rats, cockroaches, even a revivified cat and a passing deer. And there are people who become fungus victims—Naomi’s dumb-as-a-rock ex-boyfriend Mike (Aaron Heffernan), who shows up looking for her and becomes the goop’s uglified agent, as well as gun-happy Griffin and his thieving band of bikers. And one shouldn’t forget Ma Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave), the owner of one of the public storage units, who’s chosen this night to visit her belongings with a gun, apparently intending to commit suicide but instead becoming a befuddled accidental hero.
In short, the movie becomes a case of piling on, constantly adding more and more bits of business, much of it of the cheesy gross-out variety, until it almost collapses under the weight despite editor Billy Sneddon’s effort to keep it moving. That it remains as enjoyable as it is can be credited to its ingratiating leads—Keery and Campbell, he agreeably woozy and she whip-smart (naturally by the coda they’re become an item off the company floor), and Neeson, whose gruffly authoritative demeanor is far more amusing than the more strenuous effort he put into the “Naked Gun” reboot. The supporting cast is prone to chew the scenery (Torchia the exception), but one can only marvel at the presence of luminaries like Manville and Redgrave in relatively small roles; both are fun.
There’s also something engaging about the visual chintziness of the enterprise. The effects (VFX supervised by Nikolas D’Andrade and Bastien Chauvet, makeup designed by Lou and Dave Elsey) are wonderfully cheap—the oozing fungus isn’t much more convincing than the original “Blob.” And there’s a cartoonish quality to everything in Elena Albanese’s production design and Nicoletta Ercole’s costumes, with Tony Slater Ling’s cinematography giving it all a plasticky glow. Mathieu Lamboley’s score adds to the wacky vibe.
It’s a pity that “Cold Storage” isn’t sharper and less padded than it is, but the amiable leads make it a tolerably goofy homage to its fifties sci-fi B-movie models.