[COLUMN] Cold Storage is a Yanks-ploitation Creature Feature | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Cold Storage, the new creature feature currently in cinemas. While not anything particularly new, it’s a pretty fun time. It has some plot holes that one could throw a thermonuclear warhead through and its pacing is more than a little janky due to the obvious constraints in balancing the schedules of the actors, but it’s playful dumb fun executed reasonably well. So, if you want to go in completely blind, be aware this piece will discuss the film in its entirety. You can bookmark and come back after you’ve seen that Liam Neeson is a really fungi.

Narratively, Cold Storage is a classic B-movie creature feature, following Naomi Williams (Georgina Campbell) and Travis "Teacake" Meacham (Joe Keery), a pair of skeleton staff working at a self-storage facility in rural Texas, as they deal with the escape and spread of a dangerous fungus from a forgotten vault buried miles below. This is the kind of film that includes a shot of Travis reading The Body Snatchers to situate the audience in the film’s retro schlocky aesthetic.

However, there is something deeper at work in Cold Storage, adapted by legendary screenwriter David Koepp from his novel of the same name. As with so many of those classic monster movies that Koepp is channeling, there is a cynical heart buried beneath the film’s pulpy thrills. Cold Storage is never an especially subtle movie, but it feels like Koepp is exploring some bigger ideas within the framework of what might appear to be a cheap exploitation film.

To put it simply, Cold Storage is a film about consequences, carelessness and containment. The film begins with opening text tracing the root cause of the current catastrophe back to the destruction of Skylab in July 1979. The wreckage of the satellite was mostly scattered across the Indian Ocean, but portions of it crashed down in Southwestern Australia. In other words, Cold Storage begins with the United States recklessly dumping its waste on people wherever it happens to land.

The film’s cold open picks up about thirty years later, making it clear that the United States government has made no real effort to corral or contain the wreckage of their own space laboratory. For three decades, a piece of Skylab was put on display in a rural Australian outpost as a “Skylab Museum”, charging a dollar per entry. Unfortunately, after years of peace and tranquility, the tank burst during a routine cleaning, unleashing a deadly space spore and destroying the entire town.

Cold Storage sets its tone at the end of this cold open, as American government officials Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) bundle a sample of the fungus into a container, and the opening credits play over footage of American fighter jets firebombing the town as troops ride home on Humvees, all set to the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around”, a surfer anthem inexorably tied to the Vietnam War due to its use in films like Good Morning, Vietnam, a delightfully ironic start to a monster movie.

In some ways, it is a little funny that Cold Storage is so aggressively American in its framing. This is a movie from British director Jonny Campbell, starring British actor Georgina Campbell. Neeson and Manville don’t make any real effort to disguise their accents while playing American military officials. The film was shot on location (and on stages) around Europe, with a supporting cast that includes British veterans like Richard Brake and Vanessa Redgrave, along with young Irish talent Aaron Heffernan. At times, despite working from Koepp’s script, Cold Storage feels like what might be described as “Yanks-ploitation”, a film that is European in its production but almost parodically American in its affect.

It is perhaps no surprise that Cold Storage is effectively a film about American military policy. Once the fungus spreads to humans, it turns them into grotesque monsters, with Trevor explicitly likening the infected to zombies. Zombies can stand in for many ideas, but over the past quarter-century-or-so they have come to represent the concept of the enemy in the War on Terror, most obviously in films like I Am Legend, World War Z, 28 Weeks Later or even George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.

Cold Storage is not especially subtle in this regard. The film may not literally be set in the midst of Iraq or Afghanistan, but the opening scenes finds the American military arriving to a remote desert community in a foreign country and burning it to the ground in an almost parodic gesture of military force before returning home. It’s interesting that the film positions this sequence some time in 2008 or 2009, in the hazy space between the Bush and Obama administrations.

There is a sense that, as far as the military is concerned, it might be safe to hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on this chapter of American foreign intervention. After all, American foreign policy in the postwar era had been defined by the doctrine of “containment”, with large-scale overseas excursions justified as necessary risks to prevent the spread of antagonistic philosophies like communism. Cold Storage plays with this idea, beginning with a very literal form of containment.

Of course, the fungus is being brought home to America in the midst of a gigantic financial crisis. A time-lapse montage at the end of the credits reveals that the fungus is stored in a secure vault in a top secret military facility in Kansas, but that facility is eventually abandoned and sold to private enterprise, repurposed as a self-storage facility – one of the businesses that boomed during the financial crisis as people lost their homes and needed places to store their belongings.

Cold Storage returns repeatedly to the idea of consequence. Nothing in the film exists in a vacuum. Everything is the product of some previous factor. Travis is a former convict, working at the facility as a parole condition, his skin marked with tattoos from his time behind bars. Naomi is a single mother, who has to deal with her daughter’s father, Mike (Aaron Heffernan), the long-running consequence of a bad decision that she made as a teenager.

Even the older characters are defined by the consequences of their lifestyles and their decisions. In the cold open, Robert receives a back injury which serves as a recurring joke and ticking clock within the context of the film. When Robert reunites with Trini later in the movie, she is still puffing away on cigarettes, declining to join him on his journey to Kansas because she is at risk of “hacking up a lung.” Decisions are made, and consequences accrue from them.

There is, in this recurring fascination with long-term consequence, an implicit criticism of the carelessness of the sort of reckless American interventionism depicted in the cold open. For all that such interventions are justified with the logic of containment, they inevitably create more chaos and carnage. What has the War on Terror accomplished beyond plunging Iraq and Afghanistan into bloodshed? It has arguably only encouraged the threat posed by the extremists it sought to contain.

The film’s treatment of Robert is blackly comic. It plays on Neeson’s screen persona as the tough-as-nails no-nonsense former military operative that developed after Taken, a film coincidentally released in 2008, around the time of the cold open. Neeson is an incredible deadpan presence, as the recent Naked Gun demonstrated, and Cold Storage leans into this. It understands that Neeson speaking into a phone bestows a certain gravitas.

There are large portions of Cold Storage – undoubtedly structured around Neeson’s limited availability – which consist of the actor giving his trademark badass speeches from planes and cars. Neeson delivers these monologues like lines from Taken, but as it becomes increasingly absurd as almost every speech ends in some frankly insane justification for why potentially dozens of innocent people have to die due to government incompetence, as he drives a nuclear bomb to Kansas.

While Cold Storage is very obviously in conversation with the last quarter-century of American foreign policy, it is also undeniably a creature feature for the current moment. The film has a surprising amount in common with Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, even culminating in a nuclear detonation on American soil. More to the point, like Bigelow’s more earnest exploration of the erosion of American infrastructure, Cold Storage is about the decay of systems.

By the time that Cold Storage jumps to the present day, the fungus has been stored safely for over a decade-and-a-half. Even after the military abandoned the base, steps were taken to keep it frozen. There were officials tasked with monitoring an alarm system in case anything ever went wrong. There were white papers and processes put in place to deal with a problem if it ever arose. At least on paper, there was a structural framework to handle this potential threat.

However, Robert quickly discovers that the infrastructure has collapsed over the past couple of years. The senior official briefed on the threat had passed away, and with him went the institutional knowledge of the threat posed. Global warming has heated local water supplies, which has damaged the refrigeration technology. Robert himself has been retired and put out to pasture. Any one of those failures would be a serious issue of itself, but taken together they become catastrophic.

There is a clear sense that the infrastructure of American governance has simply not been maintained. When Robert arrives and provides Travis and Naomi with a thermonuclear warhead, he advises them that it will go off in “between nine and sixteen minutes.” That is as reliable as he can be with the faulty weapon of mass destruction he has given them. In one of the film’s wry jokes on the language of these sorts of movies, the countdown on the nuke keeps glitching.

It has been argued that one of the key problems facing contemporary governance in America is a “malicious carelessness.” There is a real indifference to the sort of work necessary to maintain the complex systems that have been created over the past decades, structures that are often casually disregarded by people who lack any knowledge of what that infrastructure do and any curiosity to find out. This indifference is its own recurring motif in Cold Storage.

The crisis only occurs in the first place because the United States cannot be bothered to dispose of Skylab in a safe and sanitary manner or even to clean up after the wreckage. The film suggests that this is just one potential ticking time bomb buried within the bowels of a dysfunctional government and national security apparatus. In a wry joke, when Robert has difficulty procuring a weapon of mass destruction, Trini reveals she hid a nuclear warhead in the house where her grandchildren live.

To be fair, Cold Storage is careless in its own ways. The film sets up and pays off a literal Chekhov’s Gun with the character of Ma Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave) and her husband’s pistol, only for that character to just drift out of the film with no real follow-up once she has served her purpose. It’s also an issue that Robert’s final scene tilts into the sort of gung-ho patriotism that the movie had largely been skewering to that point, tempering the film’s portrayal of Robert as a borderline psychotic.

Still, in the grand tradition of the old-fashioned B-movies that it emulates, there is something going on beneath the surface in Cold Storage