‘Cold Storage’ Review: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson Make Goofy Sci-Fi Horror Throwback Painless, if Not Priceless

Pandemic humor, to put it charitably, has been hit or miss in movies since the dark days of 2020, but a throwaway COVID joke in Cold Storage made me guffaw. If little else in Jonny Campbell’s film of the 2019 novel by David Koepp is as uproariously funny, there’s a likeably cheesy retro vibe to this sci-fi horror comedy about a mutating fungal virus from space that threatens to escape its containment facility and turn humanity into moldy grenades. Considering it’s been gathering dust on a shelf for two years, the movie is more diverting than you might expect, thanks to a game cast led by Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson.

Keery, with a dirty-blond dye job and a sweet deadbeat demeanor, might draw some Stranger Things fans, especially since the mix of ‘80s nostalgia with creeping dread, gory set-pieces, droll character banter and humor hatched out of fear land somewhere near that show’s tonal wavelength. But rather than recalling any specific existing property, Cold Storage just feels generically familiar, like under-seasoned comfort food.

It opens with a title card reading: “Pay attention. This shit is real.” But that claim just feeds expectations of a brand of gonzo fun that registers only intermittently. Sci-fi, action-adventure and thriller elements all sit snugly in the wheelhouse of Koepp, adapting his own book, and director Campbell showed a facility for mixing horror with playful humor in his opening episode of the BBC-Netflix Dracula that starred Claes Bang. But even though the movie is well-paced and watchable, this is nobody’s strongest work.

What possessed British acting royalty Vanessa Redgrave and Lesley Manville to sign up for minimally important roles remains a mystery, though their inimitable style is a plus.

The starting point is a reference to a Skylab space station that fell out of orbit in 1979, losing countless scientific experiments. Most of the debris burned up during re-entry and NASA believed it had recovered any parts that had crashed to Earth. But a couple decades later, something weird is happening with an overlooked oxygen tank in a tiny Western Australian Outback town where residents are dying.

A panicked call brings microbiologist Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) rushing to the scene, accompanied by veteran NASA bioterrorism expert Robert Quinn (Neeson) and his associate Trini Romano (Manville). (Perplexing side note: The caller, played by Rob Collins, is credited as Enos Namatjira, who in real life was the son of iconic Indigenous Australian watercolorist Albert Namatjira and a well-regarded painter himself.)

The science team arrives too late to save the locals, all of whom are found on the rooftops, their heads and torsos cracked wide open. Dr. Martins discovers an iridescent green mold growing on the tank, a heterotrophic parasite stimulated by water. She takes a sample and they hurry on out of there, but the goop is fast and furious, capable of interacting with other species and adapting. A small dollop attaches itself to someone’s shoe, and a hazmat suit provides no protection. Human infection is not pretty.

The sample is shipped to the U.S. and stored at a Defense Security facility built on an old mine in Kansas. Cut to the present day, after the site has been decommissioned and turned into a self-storage company, its scientific findings forgotten in a lab deep underground. Why the microscopic fungal bug suddenly becomes active again gets only a hurried explanation in Koepp’s script, though it might have something to do with a major storm system moving in.

Keery plays Travis, aka Teacake, who works the graveyard shift at the storage company and needs the job as part of his parole conditions. He’s on a self-help kick, so refuses to participate in the plan of his sleazy boss Griffin (Gavin Spokes) to sell stolen televisions out of the warehouse. But Teacake gladly welcomes new nightshift co-worker Naomi (Georgina Campbell) and soon shares her curiosity about what’s happening on the lower levels, starting with what sounds like a smoke alarm beeping.

Their investigations turn up strange developments with the aggressive green virus, which quickly finds hosts in a deer, a scrappy bunch of bikers, Naomi’s cat and her obnoxious ex, Mike (Aaron Heffernan), whose projectile barfing puts Linda Blair to shame.

Teacake and Naomi get surprising help from Redgrave’s storage customer Mary Rooney (not my drag name) carrying a gun intended for another purpose. Robert shows up, responding to a temperature breach alert from NASA and assisted by quick-thinking operator Abigail (Ellora Torchia), who takes the virus threat seriously enough to go around her dismissive supervisors. But ultimately, it’s up to Teacake and Naomi to stop the spread in time for Robert to destroy it.

All the elements are here for a lively Earth-in-peril B-movie scenario, right down to the two appealing underdogs who might be humanity’s last hope, played with a keen balance of urgency and insouciance by Keery and Campbell. And Neeson’s dryly humorous gravitas is always welcome. But Koepp’s script is neither consistently funny nor suspenseful enough to make Cold Storage memorable.

There’s some amusement in the mutating path of the pathogen, often seen speeding through internal organs before making heads explode. Designers Lou and Dave Elsey provide some cool gross-out makeup that — like the effects work in general — is never overly slick. To its credit, this is a movie that knows better than to take itself too seriously. It’s painless enough though could have been more than that with a thorough script polish. But it should find an audience once it hits streaming.