When David Koepp’s novel Cold Storage was published back in 2019, we took the view, quite prophetically, that it was “a rampantly pulpy old-school horror/sci-fi hybrid unashamedly written with one eye on the multiplex.” Sure enough, seven years later (these things take time), the feature film version, directed by Jonny Campbell, arrives in cinemas on what appears to be a fairly limited release.
It’s a shame the film won’t find a broader audience and make a bigger splash at the box office, because it’s a big, brash, occasionally silly movie that absolutely captures the style and tone of its source material. But then again, Koepp has written the script, so it’s hardly surprising that he’s largely translated his story to the screen with the same brio and sense of outrageous fun he brought to his novel.
In 2007, biochemist Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) travels to a remote one-horse town in Western Australia with “bioterror operatives” Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville). Here they find that a heavily mutated and virulent fungus has escaped from a fragment of the disintegrated Skylab space station salvaged by a local farmer decades earlier. It has devastated the town and exploded out of its population, and before the town is incinerated to stop any further spread, one of the group is infected. A sample of the virus is collected and stored in an underground facility in Kansas.
Fast-forward to the present day; the government has sealed off the underground vault, and the buildings above have been turned into a commercial venture known as Atchison Storage. Low-level night security guards Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) hear a stray beeping alarm, and their investigation into the lower levels reveal that the fungal virus has leaked from the vault and has already started to make its way outside. It’s left to the hapless pair, along with Quinn and Romano, dragged out of retirement, to try to contain the fungus before it wreaks havoc across the world.
Cold Storage is great tongue-in-cheek fun that never takes itself too seriously, even as it delivers moments of gross-out gore – exploding animals spraying out green ooze, infected humans falling apart and being reduced to slithering goo – and some remarkably well-developed characters for a film that’s done and dusted in under 100 minutes.
From a casting perspective, it punches well above its weight, with Manville clearly having fun in an entirely uncharacteristic role and acting royalty Vanessa Redgrave in a quite touching cameo as an old woman who has come to the facility to commit suicide amongst the collected mementoes of her past. The balance between horror and comedy is pitch perfect and nicely judged; in one scene, a group who have come to loot the facility are confronted by one of the infected, bloated, drooling and suppurating and covered in fungus. “He’s got Covid!” cries one of them.
Cold Storage deserves the appreciation of a proper audience – especially with the currently hot Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell driving the narrative – and absolutely shouldn’t be given the cold shoulder. It’s really fun, guys.
COLD STORAGE is in UK cinemas now – but not for long.
