Cold Storage
At the media screening for Cold Storage we were offered complimentary choc tops, a snack befitting the film’s title. Tucking in before the film started, I noticed two things: one, that shrinkflation has well and truly hit cinema snacks and two, that the cone’s softness and diminished structural integrity suggested its use by date was upon us, if not already part of history. In hindsight I’m struck by the poetry of this pairing. Much like the choc top preceding it, Cold Storage is noticeably concise, at risk of falling apart at any moment and yet still quite enjoyable.
It’s a sci-fi horror comedy about an infectious fungus that permeates thick rubber soles, tires or seemingly any surface that stands between it and someone’s bloodstream, turning them into slime monsters with one job: splooge all over the place and infect others. Somewhat mirroring The Last of Us’s fungal disease explanation (itself inspired by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis or zombie-ant fungus), this fungus is able to control the actions of its hosts, eventually causing them to explode or projectile vomit their load towards intended converts.
We’re first introduced to our new fungal overlord after it lands in this very corner of the world (Western Australia) via a decommissioned oxygen tank from Skylab that didn’t burn up sufficiently upon reentry to Earth in 1979. Global warming in the decades following causes it to mutate and seep out of its confines, before it is haphazardly contained by the US military in the belly of Kansas’ Atchison Storage Facility, a real-life underground storage tunnel that hopefully doesn’t have anything like this just chilling and biding its time.
The film stars Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, Mike Leigh’s Lesley Manville and the Senior Action genre’s Liam Neeson. The former two are night guards at a self storage company that sits atop Atchison Storage Facility. The latter two are Pentagon bioterror operatives who’ve seen this fungus before and who must try to destroy it after the military forgets to factor climate change into its freezer math and fumbles its containment.
Normally the inclusion of “from the producer of” means diddly squat on a movie poster but in the case of Cold Storage, sharing one with Zombieland is quite apt as far as vibes go. Director Jonny Campbell may be relatively untested in film but its script comes from prolific screenwriter David Koepp, whose work spans Death Becomes Her to Jurassic Park to Mission: Impossible. Those tonal influences – as well as real-life occurrences cherry picked and woven into the narrative – result in a fairly well balanced genre romp that feels almost plausible, if not for its lack of narrative rules.
The exploding corpses look pretty good and the green goop mixed with liquified body parts add some nice body horror to the whole affair. While not laugh-out-loud funny throughout there are a few lines and moments that made me giggle (highlights include “Come here, I wanna throw up in your mouth” and “He’s got Covid!”). And I particularly enjoyed the commentary of a staged phone call about a late period being enough to completely throw your toxic male boss off the scent so you can continue divulging military secrets to Liam Neeson.
As far as performances go, this is hardly going to appear at the top of any of the cast’s CVs but Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell have good, believable chemistry as the shift workers who stumble upon the fungus and Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville are a lot of fun as old dogs teaching young dogs how to use a suitcase nuke.
Liam Neeson, definitely not phoning it in
While Cold Storage is an effective enough zom-com it does have some previously mentioned narrative problems, most of which occur towards the end of the film and leave you with the feeling that it’s missing a beat after the climax and doesn’t really know how to end. It also leaves you with a few questions, like:
What happens to Vanessa Redgrave’s character?
Are deer capable of outrunning a nuke?
Why does the fungus choose to reanimate a dead cat in the boot of a car when there’s a living man in the driver’s seat?
Like my slightly expired choc top it’s at risk of falling apart if you pick away at the cone too much. My advice? Don’t pick, just shove it in your mouth and enjoy.
