Cold Storage

Schlocky B-movie thrills with A-list talent in this goofy romp about the race to stop a space fungus that turns people into exploding zombies.

“Cold Storage” almost seems like it was made to answer a riddle: what if a bunch of big-name Hollywood talent got together to make a schlocky, goofy low-budget sci-fi/horror thriller with a bunch of terrible CGI and exploding zombies?

These sorts of cheap thrills movies are made by the dozens, usually starring actors you never heard of with miniscule budgets and released only on streaming platforms — and not the good ones. It’s the single-A league of filmmaking, where a lot of people start out or wind up.

But how many flicks like this star Liam Neeson? Or Oscar-nominated actress Lesley Manville? Or a young Netflix star like Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”)? Or have a script by legendary screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible”), based on his own book?

For gosh sakes, screen icon Vanessa Redgrave turns up as a trigger-happy granny!

Directed by Jonny Campbell, it’s basically an ode to B-movies. It’s meant to be enjoyed ironically, an exploitation romp with a gleeful thirst for gore and silly laughs. I swear they deliberately made the special effects look more terrible than they had to be in order to lean into that aesthetic.

I grew up on movies like this and still appreciate them. I can’t quite get all the way to recommending “Cold Storage,” but it’s the sort of thing meant to be appreciated in a crowd, where people can roar with laughter or collectively snap their head backs at the latest stomach-churning visual assault.

It’s about a mutated fungus that came from space, specifically the Skylab space station that crash-landed in 1979. The idea is it included an ill-fated experiment, got mutated in orbit and wound up in a tiny Australian village, eventually escaping its tank and manifesting as a greenish goo, turning any creature it infests into a raving undead.

Eventually, their bodies burst apart, better to spread the stuff further.

Neeson plays Robert Quinn, a colonel with the DTRA, some mysterious military unit charged with reacting to outbreaks, aliens and other sorts of weird stuff. He and his partner, Romano (Manville), manage to contain the situation, but not without some nasty deaths.

Eighteen years later, Quinn is retired and the fungus sample was stored in an underground military vault in Atchison, Kansas. Unfortunately, the property was later abandoned and sold, and the upper levels are now being used as personal storage units for the locals. Nobody knows about the mysterious lab buried deeper — or that the fungus has seeped out of its container and threatens all of Earth.

Keery plays Travis aka Tea Cake, a young motormouth who recently got out of prison for some youthful exploits, so he can only get a job as the midnight shift guy at the storage unit. His boss, Griffin (Gavin Spokes), is a greaseball jerk, but he’s intrigued by his new coworker, Naomi (Georgina Campbell), who’s about his age but already has a kid, and accompanying problems with the baby-daddy.

Alerted to the alarms for the failed cryogenic storage, Naomi and Travis start poking into places they oughtn’t to, eventually discover the fungus situation and call in the authorities — but not before various interlopers get infected, resulted in a cadre of rot-monsters traipsing about.

Quinn eventually gets the call, but the uppity-ups in the military don’t really buy the whole fungus theory, so he more or less has to go in alone, helped surreptitiously by a young, level-headed operator, Abigail (Ellora Torchia).

Neeson gets to play off his tough guy persona, included plenty of gravelly dialogue delivered urgently over the phone, a la “Taken.” Koepp ratchets the cheese factor up as high as it will go with lines like, “We are at pucker factor 10, Abigail!”

Things get steadily more gruesome as we go, and you’d better have a hunger for spattered brains, popped eyeballs, firehose vomiting and all others sorts of devastation of the flesh. There are even some rats, moose and cats who get a drop of the green fever, rendered in deliberately amateurish computer animation that looks inferior to video games from 20 years ago.

“Cold Storage” is a gratuitously enjoyable movie, for people who enjoy low-budget, lowbrow thrills. The fact it includes the collaboration of so many storied artists who you’d think would have nothing to do with something as tawdry as this only heightens the fun.