COLD STORAGE

Based on the 2019 novel by David Koepp, this sci-fi horror stars Joe Keery as Travis “Teacake” Meacham and Georgina Campbell as Naomi Williams. Decades ago the US military locked a green fungus sample from a crashed space probe away in an underground bunker. Cut to the present day and the facility has been repurposed as a 24 hour self-storage business, but disaster strikes when the highly infectious fungus mutates and leaks. It zombifies any living creature it touches, causing them to eventually burst – including humans. Teacake and Naomi, two night shift employees, find themselves leading the charge to contain the outbreak. They team up with curmudgeonly retired bioterror expert Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), whose warning the about this exact catastrophic scenario since the 1980s’s has fallen on deaf ears. Lesley Manville co-stars as Quinn’s former Pentagon partner Trini Romano, and Vanessa Redgrave has a cameo as gun toting widow Ma Rooney. Their roles bring moments of light hearted humour, with Manville even getting sweary near the end. The action mostly takes place inside the storage facility, but the set is far from bland, featuring a maze of tunnels, corridors, and different rooms. We get to know Teacake and Naomi as the story builds, before everything kicks up a notch when the survival stakes are raised. Cue the jump scares! The special effects are a standout, particularly the visceral interior body scenes showing the virus coursing through an infected person’s insides and the explosions when the bodies “pop” into goo and innards, which are every bit as disgusting as they sound. Clearly the intent is to gross out the audience and it works. I loved the outside the box filming techniques, like the clever bird’s eye view sequence showing how the virus was transmitted by a cockroach. Author Koepp was also the screenwriter and he ensured the dark humour from his own source material remained. Genius! More A-grade than B-grade, this is marvellously engaging and unhinged.