Directed By Jonny Campbell

Starring – Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson

The Plot – Teacake (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell), two young employees of a self-storage company built on the site of an old US military base, have their wildest night shift ever when a parasitic fungus escapes from the lowest sublevel of the base, where it was sealed by the government decades before. As the temperature rises underground, this highly contagious microorganism multiplies and unleashes its terrors on the facility’s inhabitants; human and otherwise. With time running out, it’s down to Teacake and Naomi, with the help of a grizzled bioterror operative (Neeson), to contain the rapidly mutating menace and prevent the explosive extinction of Mankind itself.

Rated R for violent content, gore and adult language.

COLD STORAGE | Official Trailer | STUDIOCANAL

POSITIVES

A good idea puts the butts in the seats, but an entertaining personality maintains the attention of the audience, and while its results will inevitably vary with everyone who sees it, “Cold Storage” has each of these vital components to flesh out a grotesquely gruesome and gory b-movie body horror romper that maintains convincing appeal, despite some nagging hinderances that leave it feeling a bit unfulfilled in the expansion of its execution. The idea stems from a real life tragedy involving the NASA space program, but with a secretive conspiracy angle that is believable enough without the movie delving into the nonsensically fantastical, and though we’ve seen a variety of contaminated species films ever since “Alien” struck it big, there’s an expanding creativity to the capabilities and bodily decay of the humans that this green slime comes into direct contact with that surprisingly invigorate the idea with enough uniqueness to allow the concept to captivate on its own terms, featuring some gruesomely gnarly gore designs that silence any doubts of this movie’s R-rated helming. As for the personality, Campbell inflicts enough slacker sensibility in the constructive designs of Teacake and Naomi to not only make their ice-breaking dynamic flourish with compelling chemistry between Keery and Campbell, but also enough sardonically supercharged responses from them to convey the overwhelming and uncontrollable magnitude of the situation that they quite literally just walked into. The comedy itself does generate a few merited gags in the commentary of what they’re interpreting as the eyes and ears of the audience, without deliberately intruding on the thickness of dread that consumes the overhanging atmosphere of this single stage setting, crafting a nonsensically relaxed enveloping that channels components of “Shaun of the Dead”, even without the cleverness of its satire to uncover some insightfully enriching social commentary. Beyond this, the storytelling can feel slightly clunky during an experimental second act that deviates away from the confines of a linear narrative to flash backwards while answering some questions enacted from the characters in the foreground of the story. In this aspect, there’s plenty more going on than just your typical flashback visuals to correspond with overhead narration, but rather an entire passage route of the fungus that vividly conveys the extensive journey that it took towards plaguing an animal that Teacake and Naomi come into direct contact with, and while the sped-up visuals certainly go a long way sifting through the weeks and months that transpire quite rapidly before our very eyes, it’s truly the editing that is downright remarkable for such a stunning sequence, transitioning settings and species alike with smoothly seamless pasting that emanates a time lapse feeling full of artistic merit to an engagement not as preoccupied with presentational ambition, in turn imbedding some periodic stylistic flourishes in its unveiled exposition of conflicts that I truly wish the movie utilized more of. The film is also blessed with a highly charismatic ensemble that truly bring these characters to life, whether in anxious restlessness that drives Keery and Campbell to resolve their obligational boredom, or the lived-in rich and bountiful history of work colleagues Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville balancing the efforts of the former with their pursuit of an outside subplot that I surprisingly found more fascinating than what’s transpiring at the storage unit. With no disrespect whatsoever to Keery, as I feel like his reserved laid back tone and personality directly influences the execution of Campbell’s direction, but it’s actually Neeson and Manville who are the heart of the engagement, both with a lived-in dynamic that makes their work relationship feel like marriage, even despite their respective married partners, but also their cool as a cucumber demeanors that never feel overwhelmed with the adversity of the situations they face, and while you could effortlessly make the argument that Neeson is certainly performing the same character that he has in all of his action movies, with Manville attached, it feels like the redundancy of his characterization outline takes on new life with a female equal, and it makes me wish dearly for a sequel exclusively involving them, as it’s clear that both are having intoxicating fun with their respective roles.

NEGATIVES

While I had a lot of fun with “Cold Storage”, especially as an appreciator of B-movie campiness, I can’t help but feel slightly disappointed by my final opinions on the film, which take a noticeable decrease in attained momentum, as a result of some lackadaisical execution with its creativity wasting away such a compelling idea. For starters, the established conflict, while undeniably the solar system that the entirety of the movie’s dynamics and subplots orbit around, doesn’t feel even remotely utilized anywhere close to the extent of its limitless potential, particularly in the capabilities of this fungus, which after the movie’s midway point never evolve or expand upon what is initially established, leaving the stakes of the situation capably maintained in check, all the while lacking the kind of compelling urgency to the movie’s 93-minute runtime to naturally breed tension and suspense to the air of the engagement. There’s nothing that feels intentionally padded to the air of the pacing, just a limitation to the overwhelming circumstances that isn’t explored thoroughly enough to give Teacake and Naomi an evidential disadvantage against what they’re fighting, even with the transmitting of the fungus growing further with each passing minute, and for my money, I could’ve used more situations where the two lead characters narrowly escape the mysterious slime, as the physicality of their portrayals is never pushed towards anything that feels anything close to transformational. The script also has clunky problems with its opening act, which admittedly takes a bit longer than expected to surmise the events that put the plot into motion. Though the film goes out of its way to flesh out the history of this dreaded fungus, with one particular scene during the movie’s introduction used to articulate its supernatural capabilities, we don’t even meet Teacake until around the fifteen minute mark of the film, nor is the storage lot’s big secret uncovered until around the half hour mark, and it crafts a lingering impatience factor that not only makes the opening act feel monotonously dry with an abundance of exposition, but also entirely impractical that any kind of accessible business would be built on the grounds of such a vital storage lot, requiring a bit more suspension of disbelief than necessary, even in a movie with a mutated fungus killing people. Last but not least, while the body horror of the movie does elicit stomach-churning imagery conveying the anatomical devastation of the fungus’ impact, it does rely a bit too heavily on computer-generated special effects than I would’ve preferred, especially the kind involving the overwhelmingly artificial semblance of blood deposits that detract in the worst kind of ways to a scene’s integrity. Being that the movie was made on a bigger budget than I was expecting with the execution of its production (30 million), it’s a bit disappointing that the effects department settles for the laziest ways to illustrate its buckets of blood, without anything tangibly influential to even spawn winces out of me from the imagery, and like any other movie involving body horror, I wonder how much more lethal these sequences would’ve been if they went the practical route, and actually brandished a textural accuracy to these explosions and contortions.

OVERALL
“Cold Storage” is a grotesquely grisly and nonsensical B-movie romper that conjures enough fun in the extent of a wild idea, even with some detracting factors limiting the movie’s ambitious potential. Performatively, the film is carried by charismatic-heavy turns from Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, and the irreplaceable dynamic duo of Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville serving as the movie’s heartbeat, but atmospherically falls a bit short in the absence of urgency or palpable tension to the claustrophobic confines of its situational horror, in turn keeping the expectations of the audience on ice, and instead opting for the gory and goofy goodness that this movie conjures up in drums

My Grade: 6.9 or C+