Cold Storage

Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery

Jonny Campbell's Cold Storage is a blend of comedy and horror that failed to ignite at the box-office when it was released in the US in February. With loads of goofy gore, it is an amiable formula film that will not stick in one's mind's eye for long. David Koepp's screenplay posits that a chunk of Skylab containing an invasive and toxic fungus dropped to Earth in Kansas and has been sequestered by the government ever since. However, the Feds dropped the ball and the deadly fungus bunker in now a public storage facility whose security staff includes Cold Storage's two leads, Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. While they hide from creatures affected by the green goo, two retired guv'ment agents ride to the rescue. 

That these parts are played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville belies the saving grace of this unpretentious little film: superior acting. The timing and nuance of the crack cast lift this just above standard fare. Best in show is Vanessa Redgrave whose extended cameo shows that the old gal has still got it. Based on her recent credits, Georgina Campbell is a real comer. That she can play a character ten years younger than herself here is a triumph of acting rather than make-up. Joe Keery kind of bugs me. He overdoes the wrong side of the tracks schtick here, but he is more than competent with his movements and timing. I guess I think he is more of a Jughead than an Archie. 

Mr. Campbell has primarily worked in television. He is a Brit and I guess that explains the preponderance of thesps from the UK in the cast. He works well with the ensemble, but seems not to be a distinctive visual stylist. Believers in the auteur theory of screenwriting should note that Mr. Koepp recycled the satellite surveillance trope from Cold Storage in the Black Box script. 

Fearless Frank

Good titles, bad movie

There is not much written about Philip Kaufman's Fearless Frank because there is not much to write about. It is a feeble superhero parody that might have made a good fifteen minute Second City comedy troupe skit, but becomes tedious when expanded to the length of a feature flim. Kaufman adds Felliniesque digressions and vaguely narcotic curlicues as padding. Kaufman partisans would just as soon forget about the film, but since I've never championed his work, I will admit that I got a few laughs out of it; more than I laughed at After the Fox or The Producers.

The main reason for the laughs is the topnotch cast who tower over the thin material. A good chunk of the cast came from Chicago's aforementioned Second City. Second City's Severn Darden and Anthony Holland were in Kaufman's first film, Goldstein, and return for Fearless Frank. Fellow comic troupers Joan Darling and David Steinberg joins them for this one. All four would soon be familiar faces in Hollywood films and television. Jon Voight is the titular Frank, who is reanimated by mad scientist Darden into a superhero. All the leads do what they can with much scenery chewing and mugging. Nelson Algren, who also acted in Goldstein, appears as one of the bad guy's henchmen with the sobriquet, "Needles"; a tribute to Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm. Monique van Vooren appears as eye candy and Frank's dream girl, another character aptly named: Plethora. Cult musical figure Ken Nordine delivers droll narration.

Jon Voight

As one can surmise from this plot summary, Kaufman is borrowing a little from Mary Shelley, but the primary source of this parody is the then popular Batman TV series. This is most obvious when Kaufman punctuates Voight's defloration of Ms. Darling with mod titles of "Wham" and "Pow", but, alas, there is no "Biff". However, it is hard to parody something that already verged on self-parody. The film was first shown at Cannes in 1967 and, unsurprisingly attracted no interest. It was eventually released on a double bill with an obscure Dustin Hoffman B picture after the success of Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Kaufman got a deal with Universal Pictures which eventually released his next picture, the far superior Western, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Fearless Frank, at times looks good enough to be a Hollywood feature, but in some sequences, like a superimposed Frank flying over Chicago, it is strictly amateur hour. Kaufman never really evolved into a first rate visual stylist, but his next film would show a quantum leap. Too much of Fearless Frank's widescreen frame contains wasted negative space, meaningless visual clutter that distracts from the players.

I also feel the sophisticated Europhile Kaufman had a rather leaden feel for comedy. There are some amusing bits in ...Northfield and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he totally muffed Tom Wolfe's satiric jabs at Americana and the space program in The Right Stuff. I find that highly lauded film and his acclaimed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be gaseous, over long bores. I do like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Henry and June, and Quills. The White Dawn and The Wanderers are watchable and the rest is dross; including Fearless Frank.

Resident Evil

Austin Abrams 

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is a deserved hit with both the critics and the public. The youngsters and gamers seem to like it. My ticket taker gushed that "it was by far the best in the series even if it didn't have Mila." The audience was young and entranced by the sheer gallop of this genre exercise par excellence. I was worried after the polyphonic breakthrough of Weapons that Resident Evil would be monophonic in its adherence to the project's gaming heritage, but it is more than a rollercoaster ride. It is agitatedly, but rewardingly monophonic in following the adventures of dispatch delivery agent Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he encounters carnivorous alien creatures while he tries to deliver the film's MacGuffin to a lab. It does not end happily, but the film's themes are suited to the rat in a maze structure. Cregger leavens the material with sick humor which the cast delivers sublimely.

Some have objected to the prevalent visual schema of slime, often toxic, that fills the screen during the last act. This is silly because the film's sense of horror is that of human putrefaction. The hero, a modern Ichabod Crane, is trying desperately to outrun the onslaught of mortality. The unease of COVID and whatever the heck happened in Russia pervades the air. What mysterious strain will cause us to putrefy? Thankfully, Austin Abrams gives a sly, visually elastic performance that brings out the absurdity of Bryan's plight. The supporting players whizz by before getting slimed. I was most amused by the efforts of Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry. 

I was reminded of a similar genre exercise that traded off then current fears, Spielberg's Duel. The villain stalking Dennis Weaver is a kin to the good old boys that shot up Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider. The villain of Resident Evil is harder to pin down, something more mysterious in the air. Guns and rifles of many varieties do seem easy to find in this film's version of America. It posits that if life is a First-person shooter game then, soon, we will all be dead.

This is for Carla, a horror aficionado and connoisseur of onscreen putrefaction.