Cold Storage: Fungus-Among-Us Starts Strong in Overstretched Disease Horror

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-

There’s no shame for a modestly budgeted Hollywood film to scavenge plot points from superior movies. Take Cold Storage, the latest Liam Neeson starrer, which evokes both The Andromeda Strain and Alien in the first 10 minutes alone.

It even has the exact same opening as The Andromeda Strain, with Neeson leading a team of disease investigators to a secluded town (in Western Australia here) to find everyone dead.

The cause? Their chests are blown open from the inside.

Naomi (Georgina Campbell) and Travis (Joe Keery) go on a fungus hunt in Cold Storage

It is a terrific opening, and any writer would jump at the chance to work with that premise. Derivative or not, It’s pure gold.

Unhappily, the gold is tarnished in the subsequent script.

This is surprising, since the writer David Koepp (who adapted his own 2019 novel) is the third most commercially successful writer of adventure movies, responsible for the likes of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, two Jurassic Park movies, an Indiana Jones and a Mission Impossible.

Back to Cold Storage. The pathogen was a fungus that had been aboard NASA’s 1970s space station Skylab, and survived the plummet to Earth. Typically, they bring samples of such life to space to study how they react. This one reacted insanely.

The team leader Robert Quinn (Neeson) has the town firebombed (not before losing a colleague) and sends a sample back to the States. There it ends up, not at the Centre for Disease Control as you’d expect, but in a containment lab deep underground in rural Kansas. In a quick montage, we learn the lab was eventually decommissioned, and the land sold privately. Not the usual fate of a potentially extinction-level pathogen, but ironically, the green goo now sits frozen below a storage locker rental establishment.

That’s where things stand when two minimum wage employees – the overqualified Naomi (Georgina Campbell) and the overly talkative ex-con Travis (Joe Keery) - decide to investigate a strange noise they keep hearing from below.

This is where Cold Storage could have kept its eyes on the prize. Koepp clearly has his heart set on writing a midnight movie, but such things don’t require a lot of character development, especially in barely 90 minutes of screen-time. Naomi and Travis’ adventure in the underground vault must wait while they bicker, share their life stories, tease and otherwise overstay their welcome – which is not something protagonists are supposed to do.

This is especially true in a plot larded with subplots – all of them providing sustenance for the green goo. There’s a boss who runs a fencing operation out of the storage lockers, with the help of some bikers. There’s the estranged father of single-mom Naomi’s kid, who tracks her down at work as all fungal hell breaks loose. There’s an old woman (Vanessa Redgrave!) who keeps keepsakes of her late husband in her locker, and is prepared to commit suicide on what I assume is their anniversary. And on and on.

For his part, Neeson’s Quinn must deal with a new boss, who believes that the original Skylab infection was a big nothing-burger and stands in Quinn’s way in every way. It is nice to see Neeson play a character who isn’t primarily a killing machine. Although, he does get to shoot a gun in the last act, I guess because he’s Liam Neeson.

The good? Director Jonny Campbell makes effective use of a fungus-eye view of the innards of human capillary systems and lungs as the malevolent mushroom makes its way to the brain with the speed of an F1 driver. And the infected, fungally directed animals (a cat, rats, a deer, a cockroach) at times give the film a creepy, almost Evil Dead-like vibe. (The “mind control” aspect of the fungi could have been expanded a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

Unfortunately, in Cold Storage, the first act sets too high a bar to maintain, and the rest, though watchable, is busy-ness  punctuated by green splatter.

Cold Storage. Directed by Jonny Campbell. Written by David Koepp. Stars Liam Neeson, Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery. Opens in theatres Friday, February 13.