‘Pay attention! This shit is real!” screams an on-screen warning at the start of this overstuffed horror-comedy-action outing. As much as the deadly fungus it foists on Earth, an outbreak of sardonic attitude runs rampant here. It falls to two bantering storage facility workers, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, to contain a potential apocalypse event – with intermittent high-grade thespian help from Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and old faithful Liam Neeson. (Somebody clearly called in a few favours here.)
Things kick off as the Skylab space station falls out of orbit in 1979 – one of its research containers winds up in the Australian outback. Fast-forward to the early 00s and a team of bioterror operatives, including Robert (Neeson) and Trini (Manville), wipe out the virulent fungus that escapes – though not before it turns one of them into a human smoothie. But the Kansas facility where they stow a sample is later decommissioned, and the ground floor converted into storage lockers. Before you can say “heinous government negligence”, night-shifters Teacake (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell) are itching to check out the random alarm sounding somewhere behind the walls.
Screenwriting maestro David Koepp, adapting his own 2019 novel, may have been suffering from a case of brain spores himself; he lets the film feverishly propagate through a discipline-free combination of straightforward pestilence thriller, Kevin Smith-esque wage-slave comedy and gleeful B-movie grossfest. The mutant mildew obeys no discernible rules other than encouraging its hosts to distribute it in the most splatterhouse way possible, from encrusting rat kings to self-skewering cats. Meanwhile, Keery’s ex-con and Campbell’s veterinary student are saddled with stretches of prolix wisecrackery that, because of the sheer volume, rarely zings à la Shane Black.
Director Jonny Campbell, last seen in cinemas with 2006 poorly-received Ant and Dec comedy Alien Autopsy, keeps the pace frantic, down to a Fight Club-style internal bodycam that courses along infected synapses. Not even Neeson, stocked to the gills with flinty quips (“We are at pucker factor 10”), introduces much rigour – especially as he falls over every time he goes into action. You can’t knock the cranial explosion count, but only once does Cold Storage rise to creating a more insidiously disturbing moment of parasitic horror: during the intro, when the camera rises up above tin shack roofs to reveal the townsfolk all erupted like human pork crackling. Where it initially threatens to be a new The Thing, it finally serves up sloppy zomcom; just about enough for a Friday night but not much else.
• Cold Storage is out now in the US, on 20 February in the UK, and on 12 March in Australia.
