Cold Storage
It is an accident waiting to happen, buried in the red tape of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency and the former Kansas mine which once housed a secure US military facility, long disused and now the Atchison Storage Facility, the night shift covered by Travis “Teacake” Meacham and Naomi Williams, unaware of the site’s history and the subterranean warren behind the official floorplan.
A fragment of Skylab having crashed down in Western Australia in 1979, it carried a mutated fungus which lay dormant for twenty-eight years until it erupted and killed the population of the small town which kept the oxygen tank as a souvenir; DTRA operatives Robert Quinn and Trini Romano having contained the threat at that time, it is he who receives the call that there may now be a containment breach at Atchison.
Based on the novel of the same name by screenwriter David Koepp whose box office tally is just shy of three billion dollars, directed by Alien Autopsy’s Jonny Campbell it is possible that something has been lost in translation or frozen out when thawing Cold Storage for the screen, an explosive science fiction horror comedy which never once manages to be funny and forgets urgency is a requisite of any thriller genre.
With Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville as Quinn and Romano, cut loose by the agency and dodgy hips deep in bureaucracy as they try to the gather equipment and traverse the state on purloined transport to ground zero before the contagion spreads, on site are Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery as Naomi and Teacake, her first assessment of him that he talks to much accurate and certainly in no need of an epilogue on how he got his nickname.
Filmed in Morocco and Italy rather than Australia and Kansas, a state devoid of hills and the actual facility only housing one extended level rather than multiple, the parallel threads crawl forward slower than the green slime makes its way through the tunnels, the initial escape via cockroach to kitten an extended digital interlude so cheap it looks like a filler awaiting the final pass, perhaps forgotten while the film sat shelved two years since completed.
Aimed at Keery’s Stranger Things fanbase with no attempt to challenge either them or him and taking place in impersonal rooms filled with discarded objects, Cold Storage is familiar but unnecessary, touted as “from the producers of Zombieland” but playing more like Slither and lacking the wit of either, even the infected deer less entertaining than its cousin in A Most Atrocious Thing, a zombie apocalypse led by a fool and lacking crucial bite.
Cold Storage is available on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD and digital download from StudioCanal now
