31 Days of Halloween: Cold Storage

2026, Jonny Campbell (Am I Being Unreasonable) -- download/Amazon

Including the 'download' tag as I did download it earlier this year, but before it showed up on Amazon, where we actually watched it.

Another staple of the season is the ooey gooey gorey flick which we see as a nod to Peter Jackson's early flicks. This one brings a familiar trope of a space fungus which quickly infects a bunch of people and has to be eradicated before it escapes containment. Nukes are required.

Preamble. Some guy in Australia is panicking and calls a number from a payphone as a sandstorm dials up. He is transferred and transferred and transferred till he ends up at the cell phone of Dr. Martins (Sosie Bacon, Smile), in Rome, Italy. She's confused as to why he's talking to her, but it becomes quickly apparent that something hitchhiked its way back to Earth when the Skylab crashed and its ravaging his town. US Military experts Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson, Taken) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville, The Crown) are sent to Australia (not Australian military? cuz NASA is involved, I guess?) where they find a fungus that has killed everyone. And soon after, it kills Dr. Martins after it eats through the rubber soles of her boots, her... Doc Martens... get it? She dies, they collect the fungus sample and firebomb the entire town. The sample is moved to a secure storage site in Kansas.

Years later the secure storage site is decommissioned and sold off as Self Storage, where ex-con Travis "Teacake" Meacham (Joe Keery, Stranger Things) works the night shift, along with cute newbie Naomi (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian). Something is beeping behind the cheap drywall, which leads to a US Dept of Defense storage area deep below their Self Storage. And just outside the room the two find a very gross looking "rat king", covered in the same ooey gooey green slime mould as we saw in Australia. It got out.

Things get worse. Of course they do, or we wouldn't have the movie.

Its a fun romp, but surprisingly a tight story. Usually the infection "gets out" and we get many many scenes of people getting infected, of yokels blundering into their own death. But even though the fungus does travel on a cockroach out of the storage facility to "infect" a dead cat, and afterwards the asshole who killed the cat, the story stays entirely in the confines of the storage facility. Oh, there are victims, including the owner of the facility (he bought it, cheap, from the govt) and his low rent biker friends, but mostly its about Travis and Naomi running around, trying to stay safe.

And the banter was top notch. Travis is "chatty" while Naomi is smart enough to call him loquacious. They are flirty without being a hookup, brave enough to save Mrs Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave, Black Box), as well as carry the "not a suitcase nuke" into the bowels of the facility, but not stupid. Its billed as a comedy, but everything is played straight, but does not take itself too seriously. But it has an internal continuity and direction which was refreshing for one of these movies.

As long as you ignore the fact that after Travis sends Mrs. Rooney up the stairs and out of the facility, we never see what happens to her. She does not drive away. She is forgotten, and likely edited out.

And yes, ooey gooey gore. Loads of it. The fungus, once it hits maximum yield, likes to make its host explode. Lots of splattering loads of green and red gore, but without bothering to worry about the "did we get any on us" of other movies. We can ignore that only a small amount eating Doc Martins' boot done her in, but the two "heroes", as well as (Not Just) Aging military agents Quinn and Romano could have been exposed many many times, but aren't, cuz what would the fun in that be?