An alarm in a former US government high-security storage facility indicates that a mutant fungus has escaped. Crisis specialist Quinn (Liam Neeson) is called out of retirement — but cutbacks mean he has to rely on minimum-wage employees Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) to contain the outbreak.
Screenwriter David Koepp is associated with big ticket franchises – Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones – but often has more fun with inventive, small-scale genre pictures – Stir Of Echoes, Presence, Black Bag. His Cold Storage script, adapting his own 2019 novel, efficiently mashes up The Andromeda Strain and The Return Of The Living Dead: a mutated fungus gets loose in an underground complex; disparate, desperate folk try to put a lid on the situation before outbreak turns into apocalypse.
Jonny Campbell directed the 2006 Ant & Dec vehicle Alien Autopsy, but has mostly worked in TV, handling episodes of Dracula, Doctor Who, Westworld and In The Flesh. The Koepp-Campbell team gives freshness and heart to a familiar underground runaround with monsters cast with newish stars and welcome veterans. A prologue set in outer space, Rome and Australia and a cameo from Sosie Bacon as an ill-fated xeno-mycologist establishes the direness of the threat. Then, in a horribly convincing development, downsizing of government programmes means the high-security containment unit becomes a forgotten part of a slightly iffy commercial storage outfit. When the forgotten alarm goes off, new policies mean that no-one associated with the current administration wants to bother saving humanity from a zombie plague — so it’s down to misfits.
Liam Neeson is genially cranky as the veteran hero with a bad back, while Joe Keery (Stranger Things) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are fun and funny as the regular employees who become humanity’s first line of defence against creeping brain-rot. Vanessa Redgrave and Lesley Manville also show up — their awards shelves have no more room, so they might as well forsake sensitive dramas for a spell and have fun shooting zombies. You also get apt needle-drops (The Beach Boys, Blondie) for montages in which the raging fungus does its thing to ‘I Get Around’ and ‘One Way Or Another’.
A clever, funny, suspenseful, interestingly cynical science-fiction horror movie with a great collection of monsters — courtesy of make-up geniuses Dave and Lou Elsey — and a cast whose enthusiasm is, appropriately, infectious.
