Storage 24

Storage 24 (2012)

Runtime: 87 minutes

Directed by: Johannes Roberts

Starring: Noel Clarke, Colin O'Donoghue, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Laura Haddock, Jamie Thomas King

From: Medient Entertainment

Here is something different from me. I could rant and rave on my own about this lame-ass British horror film concerning a goofy-looking bipedal creature on the loose in a storage unit and he's after a bunch of asstagonists (I saw this last night on Showtime Beyond) but instead I'll copy and paste what some dude on Letterboxd said about it, as he (or she) does it real well. The rest of this is from some person calling themselves SpectrumCulture. I will return tomorrow night with something completely different.

Under the guise of what was presumably once a half-baked Alien fan fiction story, Storage 24 is a yawn-inducing derivative work stricken with so many narrative and structural issues it’s confounding–and useless-to begin listing them all. Shlock material at least offers the potential for worthwhile deconstruction–it’s so bad, it’s interesting–but Storage 24 can’t even live up to those nether expectations.

Set in a storage facility that suggest labyrinthine quarters but lack a budget or imagination to conjure it cinematically, the film follows the recently-heartbroken Charlie (Noel Clarke) and his best friend Mark (Colin O’Donoghue) into Storage 24 to gather belongings Charlie once shared with his now-ex-girlfriend Shelley (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). She happens to also be retrieving her items from the locker with her friends Nikki (Laura Haddock) and Chris (Jamie Thomas King). Following a military aircraft crash in the building minutes before they arrived, the lights, security and telephone systems become erratic and/or dysfunctional and a huge portion of central London shuts down. The feuding, unlikely team is locked into the facility with an insect-like alien baddy–a hodge-podge of Alien, Predator and their infinite number of ripoffs–that rips into human flesh with abandon for no intuitive reason, omits almost-cute snorkeling sounds and is perplexed by animatronic toys. Charlie, whose characters motivations include being whiny, bellicose, and self-absorbed about his relationship troubles becomes the film’s unlikely, unlikeable hero once the bickering adults realize that a heavily-CGI’d alien monster is on the loose.

How the film builds up to the group’s somber realization of their fate is one of its immediately noticeable shortcomings. Throw-away characters present at the facility at the time of the crash are immediately forgotten or eaten by the monster in belabored scenes. It takes a painstaking amount of time before Charlie, Mark, Shelley, Nikki and Chris have their initial awkward meeting; until then, other characters act as unnecessary nebulous victims for the alien. The film posits that the viewer surely must want to see some random gore before the establishment of Characters We Are Supposed To Care About, and yet it fails to arouse much interest, horror, or suspense once it shows the alien in all its bad-CGI glory. This clunky transition to the group is indicative of the film’s many structural issues.

As characters devise plans to get out and protect themselves from the alien a whiff of misogyny cannot be ignored. Shelley is more of an object in the film than a character–onto whom Charlie can pin accusations of ex-girlfriend bitchiness and marital deception (for which there is nary an explanation or foregrounding), onto whom the alien can express a kind of extraterrestrial lust that conveniently gets in the way of his disemboweling her, and onto whom the viewer should grudgingly accept as flawed, but savable. Shelley is at least endowed with a non-sissy attitude when it comes to the alien, though her friend Nikki–gussied up to look more feminine, naturally–is prone to bouts of hysteria and fussing about over messy toilets. It’s a heavy-handed way of suggesting that the split-up couple once made a good pair with common traits. Perhaps they can discuss their mutual bravery in fighting aliens in marital counseling one day. Exes are treated with so much vehemence in Storage 24 that David (Ned Dennehy)–a crazy squatter the group befriends for only 10 minutes–faces off with the alien because it reminds him of his ex-wife, and naturally he must yell at it.

For all its contrived comparisons to Alien, Storage 24 is actually closest to Attack the Block in terms of ambition. The film wants badly to be a suave and witty little British horror flick imbued with a resonating subtext about something, anything. Middle-class relationship woes? Sure–the setting of a storage facility makes sense, given that ex-partners tend to become particularly territorial over once-shared belongings. On a more metaphorical level, the emotional baggage accrued over an ending relationship can also be found in stored-away items that can open a Pandora’s box of emotion for its owner upon their rediscovery. Unfortunately, Storage 24 blunders its potential to do anything remotely interesting or coherent with this high premise.