Reviews

"Cold Storage" won't be winning any awards, nor is it terribly memorable, but it is fun. This is a very downbeat horror action comedy with a fungal zombie vibe that's ridiculous enough to work. It's backed by a cast of down-on-their-luck, likeable characters who very sensibly don't take themselves too seriously. The results are quite watchable. I did like the "he's got COVID" moment. It's probably the only point where I would say this film was genuinely funny. That said, there's plenty of action to keep things chugging along. In summary, a silly, fun, zombie action flick. Worth a look.

After a space station’s orbit had disintegrated, one of it’s fuel tanks found it’s way to Western Australia where a deadly fungus was detected by “Quinn” (Liam Neeson) and “Romano” (Lesley Manville). Quickly realising it’s lethal and zombifying toxicity, they ship it back to the States where it is buried deep underground. After many years, this facility is sold off by Uncle Sam and is now one of those storage units for folks with excess junk to keep. It’s here that “Travis” - aka “Teacake” (Joe Keery) does the nightshift with newbie “Naomi” (Georgina Campbell). Having just admitted the elderly “Mrs. Rooney” (Dame Vanessa Redgrave) they settle down to their night’s work. Then he hears a beeping. She hears it too. They investigate. They demolish a wall. Next thing, they are deep in the depths of the former military base where the long forgotten sludge has found itself lots of new friends amongst the bugs and rodents who inhabit the ventilation system. Fleeing for their lives, they call the helpline number on the door and that reactivates the now somewhat older duo who had first discovered it. Armed with seven important items, they must race to the site and save the day before the rain gets to the deadly green stuff and world domination ensues. Though it’s all fairly standard zombie fayre, there are some fun moments as the animal kingdom (especially those of the antlered variety) find themselves infected, and both Neeson and Manville bring an agreeable degree of old-codgerism to their desperate attempts to thwart the bubbling and menacing goo that would have us all combusting. What this might only really be remembered for, though, are the brief appearances from Dame Vanessa. As she approaches her ninetieth year, you have to wonder for how much longer she will be bothered making films at all, let alone daft escapades like this one. If you are just looking for a light-hearted comedy then the affable Keery and Campbell add a little sci-fi; a corrupt boss shifting some dodgy televisions and a jilted lover to these proceedings and you could do a lot worse with films that take themselves more seriously. You will almost certainly never recall it, but it's quite good fun.

Lots of fun This is well-acted, superbly casted and has a great mix of cgi and practical effects, prosthetics and makeup to make it look well rounded. It is a fun movie, with good dialogue, characters you get invested in, and a plot that feels urgent. I recommend this a lot, and with Liam delivering his lines perfectly you get the icing on the cake!

Cold Storage (2026) opens with an intertitle explaining the fate of the Skylab space station. The film informs us that Skylab crashed back to Earth, most of it burning up during reentry. However, one crucial piece survives: an oxygen tank that somehow ends up in a forgotten Australian backwater. This raises an immediate question. A large piece of a famous space station survives intact, becomes a local tourist attraction, and even attracts media attention (we even see newspaper clippings), yet NASA remains completely unaware of its existence until people begin dying in high numbers and gruesome manners? That seems less like a plot point and more like a failure of basic information gathering. The authorities eventually (i.e., decades later) respond by dispatching exactly three people to investigate, among them the unfortunately named Dr. Hero Martins. Hero promptly becomes infected by a mind-controlling fungus. At that point it becomes difficult to decide what is most implausible: the fungus’ instantaneous incubation period, its ability to penetrate the thick sole of a boot, or its capacity to communicate with its host in fluent English (ordering her to “spread”). After this prologue, the film jumps to the present day and introduces its protagonists. The hero, Teacake, is first seen reading The Body Snatchers. The heroine is immediately established as clever enough to recognize that “Teacake” is a literary reference and, more importantly, aware that Teacake is an ex-convict whose employment is a condition of his parole. Counterintuitively, she pressures him into vandalizing the facility they are supposed to be guarding. The choice to show Teacake reading The Body Snatchers is curious. Were the filmmakers worried audiences might not understand from the opening sequence that they were watching a body-snatcher story? Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. To be fair, viewers may have forgotten the fungus by this point because it takes remarkably long for anything fungus-related to happen. When it finally does, the results are underwhelming. The fungus either transforms animals into flat, weightless CGI approximations of themselves or causes infected humans to hallucinate things that are obviously digital effects added long after principal photography ended. Speaking of animals, one of the film’s more intriguing ideas arrives when the protagonists discover a rat king. The heroine explains that the concept dates back to the Middle Ages and is closely associated with plague outbreaks. Assuming that’s factual, it's actually a stronger thematic connection than the Body Snatchers reference. The “Teacake” allusion is even more esoteric, but for those who know, it foreshadows tragic events that run counter to the film’s mostly happy ending. Anyway, the long mid-stretch is devoted to both leads exhibiting far more resistance to infection than Dr. Hero despite wandering around without hazmat suits (I can only conclude that they buy superior footwear) and to what may be generously termed as character development. Neither protagonist is especially compelling. Near the end, the heroine tells Teacake that he is “more interesting than he looks,” or words to that effect. Simply announcing that a character is interesting does not make him so. Conversely, featuring a Stranger Things actor in yet another Stranger Things knockoff does make him typecast. At long last, the story arrives at its inevitable climax involving a nuclear device complete with that mainstay of clunky exposition — our old pal the Red Digital Readout, still going strong a quarter into the 21st century. We are assured that the detonation will “irradiate the place” while somehow producing “no atmospheric fallout.” Whether this paradoxical statement has any scientific basis is debatable. In any case, the resulting CGI explosion looks so harmless that it scarcely seems worth worrying about. The film concludes with a deer vomiting directly toward the camera, a final image intended to tease an inevitable sequel but that only serves as a reminder that the preceding ninety minutes were largely a waste thereof. Cold Storage wants to be a quirky creature feature, a body-snatcher thriller, and a nostalgic sci-fi horror B comedy that mostly succeeds in being a collection of familiar ideas stitched together with questionable logic, underwhelming visual effects, and characters who never become as interesting as the screenplay insists they are.