When you read the premise of Jonny Campbell’s latest feature, Cold Storage, you would believe that you would have a sure fire hit. Adapted by David Koepp, screenwriter behind, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man and starring Georginia Campbell (Barbarian), Joe Keery (Stranger Things), Lesley Manville (The Crown), and Liam Neeson (The Naked Gun), everything on paper should have gone right. Yet somehow, Cold Storage lands with a thud. Not disastrous nor bad per say, but just bland. A film that had every advantage imaginable that manages to waste almost all of it.
Two employees at a self-storage company have the wildest shift of their lives when a parasitic fungus that was sealed by the US government escapes. As the temperature rises underground, the highly contagious and rapidly mutating microorganisms start to multiply as it unleashes its brain-controlling, body-bursting terrors on the facility’s inhabitants.
Before the mood is completely killed, it is worth laying out where Cold Storage actually works. Once the film finally finds its footing over halfway through the film, it becomes the film that it was advertising itself to be. A gloriously stupid, deeply absurd B movie that knows exactly what it is. When the fungus finally starts to spread, the film leans hard into the nastiness with gleeful enthusiasm. Blood, guts, bile, and bodily fluids are all splattered across the screen. Watching this ragtag group of characters stumble their way through the early moments of a fungal outbreak inside an underground storage facility becomes genuinely entertaining. It’s loud, messy and unapologetically gross in the best way possible.
The problem is that all of that fun is locked away in the latter half of the film. Getting to that fun is a massive ordeal. The first half of Cold Storage drags itself forward at a glacial pace as we watch Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell awkwardly flirt as they investigate a mysterious beeping noise in the facility. Tearing down walls and navigating hidden chambers they discover that noise is the alarm indicating that the fungus has broken free from its cold storage. Neither Keery nor Campbell’s performances are bad as they are both sufficient with the material they are given. However, their characters’ forced tragic backstories takes away from the film’s tension. While their investigation has moments of intrigue, the film stretches this material paper thin. A narrative that saps its momentum before it really gets started.
Still, once Cold Storage finally figures out what kind of movie it wants to be, it becomes an undeniably entertaining ride. When it commits to being nasty and mean spirited, it is genuinely fun in a splatter soaked, B movie kind of way. The frustration is how much patience it asks of you before getting there. The road to that payoff is long and often tedious, but the moment the film lets loose, it is hard not to crack a smile. And with Liam Neeson gleefully hamming it up, there is always at least one reason to stay engaged. Because at the end of the day, no one is showing up for carefully constructed tragic backstories during the end of the world. We are here to watch chests explode and fungus erupt into the air, and when Cold Storage finally delivers on that promise, it understands exactly why we bought the ticket.
My Rating: C+
Cold Storage is now in theaters nationwide.
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