The Reel Review
Two employees working the night shift at a remote self-storage facility in Eastern Kansas find themselves immersed in a government containment crisis when a quickly mutating, deadly parasitic fungus escapes from a long-abandoned military containment area below the facility. Joe Keery (Stranger Things), Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville star in this sci-fi horror/comedy.
How director Jonny Campbell (Dracula) convinced Neeson, Manville and others like Vanessa Redgrave and Sosie Bacon (Smile) to appear in his bizarre film is a mystery, but hat’s off to him. The action starts off well enough, in 2008, when a newly-recovered oxygen canister from 1979’s Skylab space mission erupts, its contents rapidly killing the residents of a tiny outpost in Western Australia before being locked up and contained at a U.S. military facility that 18 years later becomes the storage facility.
Pacing wise, Cold Storage is all over the place with some really bad dialogue and eye-rolling plot twists. But it does also have some surprisingly funny moments, decent CGI and gruesomely fun, gooey practical effects. Once the space fungus escapes, the action gets really bonkers in this mediocre but mindlessly entertaining time killer.
REEL FACTS
• British-born Jonny Campbell, who also directed the first (and best) episode of the 2020 horror series Dracula, started his film and television film making documentaries for Grenada TV.
• While Liam Neeson and his mother-in-law Vanessa Redgrave (mother of the late Natasha Richardson) both appear in the film, they have no scenes together.
• Cold Storage was released three years after it was made and presumably left… in cold storage.
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