Cold Storage

When a highly contagious fungus escapes containment and begins infecting both humans and animals alike, two self-storage facility employees realize that they are all that stands between the quickly spreading fungus and an unsuspecting world.

Cold Storage is a science fiction horror comedy, a co-production between the United States and France, that was first released in Mexico and Brazil in January of this year, then the U.S. in mid-February, and then in France a week later. I‘m not sharing this for any particular reason, it‘s just an unusual release order is all, especially for a very American movie like this.

The film was directed by Jonny Campbell, who’s mostly directed a lot genre tv episodes, things like Westworld and Doctor Who, and it‘s a screenplay by David Koepp, based off of his own novel of the same name.

David Koepp has written so many screenplays. Disclosure Day, Kimi, Black Bag, Premium Rush, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the first Tobey Maguire Spider-man, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Panic Room, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the first Jurassic Park, the first Mission: Impossible, The Shadow, Toy Soldiers, and of course, the film that killed the Dark Universe, The Mummy. On and on and on. So, y’know, that’s a big resume, some ups, some downs, sure, a few strikes, a few gutters, but overall, Koepp is definitely a power hitter.

Plus, it stars Steve from Stranger Things, the guy with the hair. I like him.

So, let’s check it out…

So…

The Skylab space station fell out of orbit in 1979. During its mission, it has been home to hundreds of scientific experiments. Most of the debris burned up on re-entry, but some of it crashed to earth. NASA thought it had recovered every piece. They were wrong.

PAY ATTENTION! This shit is real.

Western Australia - 18 years ago

A guy in a dusty and isolated outback town in Australian uses a payphone in a panic. He reaches a scientist named Dr. Hero Martin, who consults with NASA. “Something has come of your tank!” He screams. 27 hours later, Dr. Martin is in Australia with Pentagon bioterror operatives Robert Quinn and Trini Romano. The pay phone is dangling off the hook. The whole town appears to be empty.

It seems this way because everyone is dead.

The corpses of all of the townspeople lie on the rooftops, their faces bloated and furred with fungus, and their chests blown open. Because it turns out, when Skylab fell out of the sky in 1979, one piece landed in Western Australia, and a local took it and used it as the centerpiece of a makeshift Skylab museum. Unfortunately, that tank had been sent into space carrying a highly-adaptable fungus for study.

And it came down bad…

Years later, while cleaning the tank, that museum owner accidentally woke the dormant fungus up, where it began to mutate quickly, and escaped. Within a day, it had infected and killed the whole town. While Dr. Martin is taking a sample, her hazmat suit is breached, and the infection pushes her to carry the fungus out of that isolated town, so it can spread around the world. But in a final moment of lucidity, Dr. Martin commits suicide in front of Robert and Trini.

The military incinerates the fungus, the entire town, and all of the corpses, while Robert Quinn and Trini Romano escort the only surviving sample to the Atchison Storage Facility. A secret underground U.S. Government cold storage vault in the middle of Kansas, located within the Atchison Caves, the Atchison Storage Facility is a (real) massive underground complex built into a former limestone mine.

Quinn and Romano lock the fungus away forever in a refrigerator, in a very cold, temperature-controlled room, deep underground.

Years pass…

Time marches on, administrations changes, and eventually, the U.S. government seals up the deep vaults, closes down the whole facility, and rents out the topmost levels to a self-storage company.

And just like administrations, the climate changes too.

Due to the ongoing Climate Crisis, rising temperatures in the groundwater supply begin to warm up the deep-freeze system that is keeping the fungus dormant. On top of that, age and neglect have caused the old facility’s systems to break down.

Somewhere, deep underground, the fungus stirs…

And an alarm is tripped.

Working the overnight shift, Atchison Self-Storage employees Travis “Tea Cake” Meacham and Naomi Williams, start to hear an intermittent beeping, like a distant smoke alarm signaling a low battery, coming from somewhere in the facility.

So they try to find the source.

Breaking through some drywall, they find beeping monitoring equipment, and a map that leads them to the sealed vault. Climbing deep underground, they find a clearly infected rat king outside of a heavy door separating them from a room that is filled with the rapidly growing fungus trying to find a way out.

Meanwhile, Robert Quinn is retired in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Late one night, he gets a call from a military officer who, due to her position and her security clearance, when asked for a name, she calls herself "Abigail.” She then informs him of the alarm sounding in the old Atchison facility. When Robert tells her he’s retired, she explains that he’s the only contact number listed, and that there’s no other system in place to deal with this.

It’s then that Abagail’s commanding officer orders her to cut off contact, but by then, Robert has managed to convince Abigail of how dangerous this situation is. She uses her personal phone to secure equipment for Robert, to arrange transport for him to Atchison, and to be his “guy in the chair“ for the mission. She also gets his old partner, Trini Romano, to meet him in Kansas, so that the two can pick up a backpack nuke—that she left amongst some of her old things in the basement of her son's house, just in case—before she drops Robert off at the Atchison site.

Outside the storage facility, Naomi's ex-boyfriend, Mike, has arrived in his car. He’s a dipshit and douchebag and is having trouble letting go. Also, he’s panicking because he accidentally shot his parent's cat, which is currently in his trunk.

As he pulls up outside the facility, an infected cockroach, that escaped from the fungus-filled vault, gets outside. It enters the trunk, and reanimates the dead cat, which then climbs up an antenna and explodes, spreading fungus everywhere, infecting both Mike and a nearby deer.

Already freaked out, when they return from the deep vault to the ground level, Travis and Naomi see that Mike and the deer have entered the facility, both now infected, and looking to spread the fungus. The duo hide in one of the storage units and call the military. They eventually get connected to Abigail, who redirects them to Robert, who is now right outside the facility.

He advises them to remain hidden.

Unfortunately, their dirtbag manager, Griffin, arrives with a local biker gang to pick up some stolen televisions that he has in storage. Travis and Naomi leave their hiding spot to warn them to flee, but Mike shows up and infects the gang as Griffin runs away. Naomi and Travis run.

Outside, they find Robert, shooting the Infected. He wants to put the backpack nuke in the deep vault and set it off, in order to eliminate all of the fungus, but he’s old and he threw out his back, and he can’t make the climb.

So it’s up to Travis and Naomi.

They re-enter the facility and climb back down to the deep vault. Robert stays outside to make sure no infected escape. A battle results, and in the end, the heroes escapes the nuclear blast in a minivan, thanks to Romano canceling her dinner plans and showing up just in time.

Days later, Travis and Naomi and her daughter are all spending some time together. Robert is recovering in the hospital. The news is praising him for his role in preventing the outbreak, while condemning the military for obstructing him. He is visited by Abigail, whose real name is Ishani, and she tells him that she leaked his reports on the fungus to the press.

Meanwhile, out in the woods, an infected deer stumbles into view, and vomits up a bunch of the fungus…

Cold Storage is a real good time.

Funny. Gross. Fun. Fast-paced. Efficiently told. Doesn't take itself too seriously. Sure, maybe it’s a little rushed at the end, but still, a good time. Dumb fun, but not stupid. It puts me in mind of films like Ghostbusters, or Men in Black, or Tremors, or Shaun of the Dead. It’s that style movie. Not quite as clever, and much grosser, sure, but close enough. This is a movie that strikes a nice balance between silly and scary and action-y. Plus, you gotta love a film that is unafraid to do a good garden hose spray of vomit now and then.

Also, while the film is not necessarily making a rather skewering commentary on the Fall of the American Empire, it isn't that much of a leap to see the events of the film–where we rain garbage across the face of the world, giving rise to unexpected and deadly consequences, directly leading to our country rotting from the inside–all of which are set smack-dab in the middle of the country, in this crumbling and rundown, cobwebbed edifice to our government‘s legacy of toxic secrets, that has been converted into a repository of useless capitalist junk... as a somewhat timely metaphor, if you want. I mean, the sins of the past refusing to stay buried, and coming back to bite us all in the ass is basically the overarching theme of America in the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first, right? It's certainly fair to say that the bitter fruit currently blooming from the twisted vines cracking the very foundations of our society are the result of the seeds we planted years ago with our rampant greed and imperialistic Post-WW2 foreign policies. So, I liked that. But like I said, it's not the film's main point, or even its second point.

Also, Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell are really great together.

Surprisingly good, surprisingly fun, Cold Storage isn’t the best film of the year, but it’s definitely one of the more entertaining.

This is a nice Friday night movie pick.