The real green menace: "Cold Storage"

Here's an unexpected comeback. Twenty years ago, a youthful British TV director, Jonny Campbell, made an abortive leap from the small to the big screen with the largely nondescript Ant & Dec vehicle Alien Autopsy. (I say largely nondescript because the supporting cast featured a bemused Harry Dean Stanton and a pre-tax, pre-surgery, pre-Riyadh Jimmy Carr, together at last; it's streaming on Prime, if you really must.) Maybe Campbell - who's spent the intervening decades compiling increasingly ambitious and impressive telly credits (Ashes to Ashes, Doctor Who, Westworld, Am I Being Unreasonable?) - felt he owed it to himself to give it another go, or maybe he's one of those single-issue filmmakers: either way, his spry, splattery B-movie Cold Storage, adapted by David Koepp from his own novel, hinges on a parasitic alien fungus that fell to Earth with Skylab in 1979 and has taken the form of an extra-malevolent pesto, finishing off everyone it garnishes. A prologue offers an unlikely Ordinary Love reunion, with a hazmat-suited Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville poking nervily around an Outback town whose residents have succumbed to these deadly green globules; the samples they take away are quarantined in a Kansas military facility that, as the years pass, gets haphazardly decommissioned and thereafter converted into the kind of self-storage facility that now provides the backdrop to countless locker-raiding reality shows on Bravo and Quest. We rejoin the action on one very eventful night shift, as the quarantine period conclusively expires and the facility's bored staffers - chatty slacker Joe Keery and conscientious single mom Georgina Campbell - go exploring with grisly yet funny consequences.

It's all a bit unlikely, in truth: corner-cutting awards-season counterprogramming shot many miles away from where it's notionally set (the end credits suggest nobody ventured further than continental Europe), with a ragbag cast drawn from the available and willing. But it's a production founded on long-lost multiplex virtues; viewers of a certain vintage could be forgiven for believing they were sat watching it at the Showcase circa 1995. (Just after Koepp's breakthrough with the Jurassic Park script, in other words.) The MVP here is production designer Elena Albanese, an MCU survivor who hands Campbell a non-virtual set that keeps revealing new levels and depths from the moment Keery decides to take a sledgehammer to the foyer wall. Koepp, though, runs her a close second. As evidenced by the initially gruff back-and-forths between Neeson's aging hero and his rookie Homeland Security pointwoman (Ellora Torchia) or Keery and Campbell's more genial badinage, this script is simply much better written than these things tend to be - and certainly far better written than Sam Raimi's Send Help, the movie's current box-office rival. Collectively, Campbell and Koepp have packed a lot into these 99 minutes, not least a witty brevity; the VFM quotient here is quite something. The storage facility also attracts, in no particular order, a larcenous biker gang, a suicidal Vanessa Redgrave (yes, that Vanessa Redgrave), a crazed deer and a CG cockroach (thereby establishing this cursed building's altogether batty ecosystem) and, come the finale, an old-school nuclear device with big red numbers ticking down on its side. That the whole proves a vast improvement on Alien Autopsy is almost a given; the surprise is that Cold Storage is more enjoyable than anything else currently stalking your local Odeon.

Cold Storage is now showing in cinemas nationwide.