My Thoughts on Cold Storage
Some movies immediately let you know they have no intention of being serious, and Cold Storage is certainly one of them, where you don't have to wait long to realize this wasn’t going to be a subtle, tense horror story.
It opens with the sort of insane setup that makes you question the sanity of everyone involved - a mutating, contagious microorganism with enough destructive power to end the world somehow got stored in a military facility, then abandoned, then turned into a 24-hour storage business.
Ridiculousness is underrated.
Joe Keery as Teacake and Georgina Campbell as Naomi are the first reason to pay attention, AS Their chemistry carries a lot of weight because the movie relies on it to move between horror and comedy, and while I didn’t always find myself laughing out loud, I was never bored watching them.
There’s a kind of quiet charm in how they react to ridiculous situations without overplaying it, as they stumble into things, ask obvious questions, and say the wrong thing at the exact right moment.
Liam Neeson is in the movie too, and yes, that feels weird at first, where he plays the retired bioterror agent Major Quinn, called back into service because apparently only he has the experience to contain a world-ending fungus - it's that kind of film.
Anyway, the plot jumps around in time and geography, where it starts with the Skylab space station, which somehow dropped dangerous debris onto Earth in 1979, and while most of it fell harmlessly into the ocean, a few bits landed on land, including near a remote Australian village.
That’s where Quinn and his partner Trini, along with Dr. Hero Martins, first encounter the parasite, before the story moves eighteen years forward to Kansas, where the same pathogen is sealed inside a former high-security military facility now converted into a storage business.
For a horror-comedy, I did feel the timeline got a bit too messy, but by the time I realized what was happening, I didn’t care too much, as the story moves fast enough that confusion becomes part of the fun.
There’s a strange pleasure you feel in watching a night-shift security job turn into an apocalypse scenario, and I thought it was funny how ordinary everything looks - bored employees, dull fluorescent lights, dust-covered boxes - and then suddenly it becomes a war zone, where the mundane as if it were important because it makes the chaos feel louder.
The movie also does a lot with practical effects - there’s gore, there’s slime, there’s decaying flesh - and yes, it looks ridiculous, but in a way that works perfectly with the tone, where some of the fungus sequences were genuinely impressive in a way that makes you appreciate how committed the filmmakers were to the joke.
Digital effects though are used sparingly, which is nice, because everything feels tactile.
The script doesn’t slow down for anyone, so you need to keep up, as David Koepp’s adaptation of his own novel keeps the jokes coming, the stakes high, and the characters reacting in ways that are often often absurd, and while some moments lean into cliché, you can forgive it because the cast makes it entertaining enough.
Cold Storage is a movie that doesn’t pretend to be smarter than it is, presenting itself a glorified mash-up of horror, sci-fi, and comedy, and it leans fully into each, where it’s silly, and it’s gory, but it’s also deliberate too, and for anyone who enjoys horror that isn’t trying to be high art, this is a solid enough, entertaining ride.
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