‘Pay attention! This shit is real!” screams an on-screen warning at the start of this overstuffed horror-comedy-action outing. As much as the deadly fungus it foists on Earth, an outbreak of sardonic attitude runs rampant here. It falls to two bantering storage facility workers, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, to contain a potential apocalypse event – with intermittent high-grade thespian help from Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and old faithful Liam Neeson. (Somebody clearly called in a few favours here.)
Things kick off as the Skylab space station falls out of orbit in 1979 – one of its research containers winds up in the Australian outback. Fast-forward to the early 00s and a team of bioterror operatives, including Robert (Neeson) and Trini (Manville), wipe out the virulent fungus that escapes – though not before it turns one of them into a human smoothie. But the Kansas facility where they stow a sample is later decommissioned, and the ground floor converted into storage lockers. Before you can say “heinous government negligence”, night-shifters Teacake (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell) are itching to check out the random alarm sounding somewhere behind the walls.
