A few years ago I went to see Doomsday, Neil Marshall’s barmy Mad Max-esque action thriller, with a Canadian friend of mine. As we left the cinema he turned to me and said. “Who told you Brits you could make action movies?” He was dead right. A couple of notable exceptions aside, British cinema has always had trouble sinking its teeth in to what, for lack of a better word, we’ll call the Hollywood staple.
Where the Americans seem to excel in the more common genres, action/horror/rom-com, the UK has always struggled to do those formats justice, leaning more towards sweeping costumed epics & low key societal dissections. And with good reason, because when we do try and create our take on movies whose format is a Hollywood institution, we end up with films like Storage-24.
Noel Clarke plays a recently heart-broken everyman, visiting a long-term storage facility in order to pick up his share of possessions from the break-up. But wait! In a shocking twist, his ex is there as well, and the added inconvenience of a military plane crash depositing something nasty in the facility pits the broken couple (and some friends) against the unseen terror.
Well, “unseen” is a bit of a misnomer, seeing as we get a full on front view of the creature in the first 20 minutes. You can’t do this, you simply cannot. Instilling fear in an audience is all about tricking their brains into creating something scarier than even the most advanced special effects can conjure. Even with its limited budget and amiable tone, it’s difficult to side with a horror film that fails this badly at Genre Studies 101.
The performances are largely forgettable, with only Laura Haddock emerging with some credit as the sarcastic and sassy best friend. The actors struggle with underwritten characters and clichéd plot-twists that leave nobody any time to develop. This is no more apparent than with Clarke himself, whose performance is earnest, but wrapped around a character with nowhere to go.
The film has its moments, with some genuinely humorous back and forth, and the film takes an entertaining twist with the appearance of an eccentric storage resident. The creature itself, whilst receiving too much screen time too early on is decently menacing, and gives Storage 24 a much needed boost in the creature feature department.
But therein lies Storage’s fundamental problem. It can’t decide whether it wants to be an Attack The Block style comedic thriller or a genuine Alien-esque sci-fi horror and instead settles on a decidedly unsatisfying middle-ground that leaves it wanting in almost every department.
Overall Verdict: Has the feel of a straight-to-DVD release and, without Clarke’s involvement, probably would have been. There just aren’t enough new or well executed ideas here to make Storage 24 worth the effort.
Reviewer: Alex Hall