Friday’s exuberant horror comedy “Cold Storage” involves long-hidden alien matter that mutates in seconds to not so comically explode into a zillion ever-expanding bits that could destroy all inhabitants of planet Earth.
That’s where Liam Neeson, “Stranger Things’ ” Joe Keery and Britain’s Georgina Campbell team up – they’ve come together at this abandoned military base stocked with alien DNA to simply save the world.
Campbell’s Naomi Williams is a single mother partnered with Keery’s “Teacake” as caretakers for what they think is simply an abandoned government storage facility.
Neeson’s retired military bio-terror expert returns to action knowing that if the government-sealed alien parasitic fungus escapes, it’s the end for everyone.
“Cold Storage,” adapted by David Koepp from his 2019 novel, was an immediate kick for Campbell.
“I loved the script. I just thought it was so funny, such a fun read and so engaging,” she said in a virtual interview from her home in LA. “As a character I love how Naomi moves the story forward with her and Teacake. She’s the one that wants to go down into the storage depths. She’s the one that’s adventurous.
“Sometimes that’s hard to find, a character like that, who is a woman who’s having fun in the chaos.
“That flips once everything starts to be more serious, more threatening. Then she has to think about her daughter and the fact that she needs to be there for her daughter.”
Next week Campbell is on view as the star of “Psycho Killer,” a thriller with no laughs where she’s a Kansas highway patrol officer determined to track and find the devious, sadistic serial killer who murdered her husband.
“It’s funny actually,” Campbell marveled, “because they both filmed around the same time and then it’s so weird that they’re both coming out simultaneously.”
Both films solidify her being dubbed a Scream Queen for her horror oeuvre.
“That’s something I’ve read and seen a few times. If people want to call me that, I’m happy to take the title,” Campbell, 32, said with a laugh.
Acting however was never a childhood dream for this South Yorkshire resident. When she was 15, she explained, “I got spotted in the street. A bit of a surprise because it wasn’t something I ever thought was accessible. No one in my family is involved in the industry.
“So I kind of fell into it. Then, when I did a job in the UK called ‘Murdered by My Boyfriend,’ that did wonderfully well in the UK. And I won a BAFTA (Best Actress) for it (in 2015).
“That, I think, really was a point where I thought, ‘Oh, I can do this!’ Like I’m good at this. I have the ability.”