Cold Storage Movie Review
A fungus causes much chaos and deaths in director Jonny Campbell’s new horror-thriller Cold Storage, which is now out on ZEE5 after its recent theatrical release outside India. The premise may sound grim, but Campbell lends it a treatment that is reminiscent of campy B movies, involving zombies. The film even pays a hat-tip to the zombie genre, with a character mistaking the victims of the fungus outbreak as zombies. At about 100 minutes, the film zips through, offering several gory kills and gruesome thrills, with some giggles along the way. The film works as a passable entertainer mainly because Campbell’s treatment ensures that the audience never takes the story too seriously, and the cast, including Stranger Things fame Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, and Liam Neeson, bring much levity to the proceedings with their ‘infectious’ energy.
Unlike the countless horror comedies, whose spirits it channels, Cold Storage does not use every scenario for laughs. In fact, the film starts on a really grim note, showing a group of scientists scanning an infected location in Australia. A fungus outbreak has devastated the whole town and accounted for countless deaths, but the scientists somehow manage to take a sample and stash it away for further research. Twenty years later, the fungus spirals out of control at a warehouse facility, causing one of the scientists (Liam Neeson), an erstwhile bioterrorism agent, to be active again and collaborate with the defense department for a strategy to stop a mass calamity.
Director: Jonny Campbell
Cast: Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, Liam Neeson
Streamer: ZEE5
The best part of Cold Storage is the sheer lack of exposition in it. Director Jonny Campbell knows that viewers understand the effects of a virus on the population, without needing spoon feeding, and the comedy stems from our realisation of the situation that exceeds that of some of the characters themselves. The film uses their unsuspecting behaviour to induce laughs from the audience, and while some of these scenarios are indeed hilarious, the rest just falls flat.
Thankfully, the cast does a reasonable job of making the most of the comedic opportunity at hand and keeping things light, breezy, and entertaining. Liam Neeson brings much of the same deadpan hilarity that he has put to better use in the recent instalment in the The Naked Gun franchise. However, one would wish that Neeson’s character went a bit more overboard with the comedy instead of often reverting to the actor’s famous gravitas. This is more a problem with the writing than the actor, for he is as capable of hamming it up as he is of exuding sheer dramatic heft. For his role alone, the film required the brand of over-the-top comedy that actors such as Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson are legendary for. Forget the fact that Neeson plays a scientist here; after all, Cold Storage is a decidedly cheesy horror-comedy that is aware of its limitations.
On the other hand, Georgina Campbell offers a sense of stoicism that stands in stark contrast to Joe Keery’s vivacity. When Keery’s character keeps his rant and banter going on and on, as an endless radio, he reminds you of a younger and witty Mark Wahlberg. Their platonic dynamic powers the film, which thankfully does not spend much time (wasting) building a romantic relationship between the two. He is named Teacake, decidedly to make him come across as a goofy guy, and at one point, she uses the word ‘loquacious’ to describe his talkative nature. It is quite hilarious.
Keery is no ‘stranger’ to being attacked by creatures right, left, and centre, and the film benefits considerably from his self-aware presence. And while the film does not become repetitive in staging its creature onslaught sequences, you wish that it had more imaginative kills and deaths than just bodies being splattered all over the place due to gradual fungal immersion. Think of a film such as Zombieland, where Harrelson’s character walks into a supermarket and uses a guitar to invite the undead, only to bash them right away with it. Cold Storage needed more of the same swashbuckling energy, and it could just have been a knock-out.