What's Vanessa Redgrave up to these days? you ask yourself. Well, would you believe acting in a fun little B-movie about a fungus that zombifies everyone and everything it encounters? No, I wouldn't've either, but there she is, looking decidedly frail (and not just because she's playing a little old lady on her last legs, either).
But she's not alone in slumming it, because Liam Neeson (stretching himself in the role of gruffly competent military man) and Leslie Manville (perhaps tired of worthy work with Mike Leigh, and itching to play a soldier who hides a nuclear device in her son's basement).
Anyway, you might wonder what this had to offer that was different from, say, The Last of Us, which is also about fungus turning everybody into zombies. Answer: this film is basically a light-hearted romp, albeit with lots of heads exploding. All the people who die deserve to die (maybe not the animals) and, in a very 80s-style (maybe even 50s-style) plot, the Military (or at least a few rogue individuals within it) does the right thing (using a bomb!) and solves the problem.
I tell a lie: in the pre-credit sequence, set about 25 years ago (which is still in the 2000s, to my horror), a likeable character does die, but (a) this part of the film is meant to set up the stakes and is correspondingly not comedic, and (b) we don't really have time to get to know the character before she meets her messy end. This part is set in some tiny outback community where a chunk of Skylab landed in 1979, specifically a tank that had a fungus sample in it, and over the years it degraded to the extent that something got out. The film starts with a woman (some NASA-affiliated fungus expert) getting a phone call at a cafe in Rome from somebody on a payphone in said tiny town. The man is clearly panicked and seems to be reporting some kind of attack, but has been shunted from person to person until arriving at our expert. She quickly jets there and along the way picks up a "team" which, in a running joke, she is surprise to find consists of just two (Neeson and Manville), who have been brought in to assess the risk. They arrive on the outskirts of town, and, spotting no signs of life, put on Hazmat suits and head in to check out what's happened.
They quickly find that everyone in town (a) is up on a roof, and (b) has exploded. The fungus expert examines a tiny hole in the tank fan finds it full of glowing green stuff, in the course of which she manages to step on some, and it turns out her wellies aren't as air-tight as the Hazmat suit. Still she gets a sample, puts it in a sealed container, and they're heading out of town with her in the lead when she starts to act erratically. We, the viewers, know what's happened because we get a "fungus-eye view" of matters, and we have watched it climb up from the welly into her brain, and told her to spread it. So, after complaining of smelling toast and feeling hot (a key plot point later) she runs to the one vehicle and starts to drive it away. Liam (I refuse to learn his character's name, because he's just Liam Neeson) jumps in front of the car and is thrown back and temporarily paralyzed (another key plot point, as he has a dickey back thereafter), the doctor gets out and holds Leslie Manville at gunpoint and then turns the gun on herself. The team then calls in fighter jets to bomb the town with white phosphorus, and the sample is put in Cold Storage in a facility in Kansas.
And then the real movie starts. The military has sold off the storage facility (with the important lower levels sealed off) to a private storage company, at which the night shift is just starting, and the horrible greasy biker boss "Griffin" argues with our just-arriving-in-his-implausibly-classic car (listening to affirmation tapes on his drive in) hero, "Teacake,"
appealingly played by one of the older Stranger Things kids. The storage facility will be our home for the rest of the movie (except for brief excursions involving Liam Neeson being informed and him forming a bond with a female soldier on the end of a phone at some Military HQ, as well as linking up with Manville to pick up "item 7" on a list he deems necessary to deal with the problem), and it operates a lot like the Mall in Dawn of the Dead. Especially once Griffin returns with a bunch of bikers, who will all meet with grisly fates. But before then, we have a meet-cute with the new employee of the night shift, Naomi, who despite being a smarty-pants, in comparison with Teacake's well-meaning ex-con (she teaches him the word "loquacious," because he is), because she's taken science classes with the aim of becoming a vet, and before that we have Teacake shepherding an old lady (just recognizable as Vanessa Redgrave) to her storage unit, where she plans to kill herself with the gun she has there (after kissing a picture of her presumably dead husband) but takes a nap first, setting up a late intervention that was entirely predictable).
Anyway, things are kicked into gear when Teacake hears a harsh beep coming from somewhere and asks Naomi to help him find it. It's coming from behind a plasterboard wall, where they see a lot of dusty old military equipment and a map showing the lower levels.
(This is the alert that means that Neeson, now retired, is woken up from his bed, and only he knows how serious this is. In fact, he's had a couple of decades of nagging the military to take it more seriously - even writing a "White Paper" (a phrase that gets uttered implausibly many times for a B-movie horror-comedy) about why global warming will eventually cause problems.) Anyway, Teacake and Naomi find nastiness, but it has also already escaped, and infects the dead cat in the trunk of Naomi's "man-child" ex-baby-daddy, who has come to ask her advice, because he accidentally shot the cat. But, as a flashback later reveals, he runs over an infected cockroach, which sends a tendril up into the trunk, re-animating the cat, which promptly seeks higher ground and explodes. This sends splatter over both the ex and a nearby deer, and we've got a full-on outbreak. Then the bikers show up because Griffin has a bunch of stolen TVs he wants to offload...
Anyway, silly stuff, very much not part of the current trend of dreary highbrow horror-as-metaphor-for-grief, and a pleasant enough diversion from the real horrors around us.
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