Cold Storage Review

Cold Storage is a sci-fi horror comedy from screenwriter David Koepp, adapting his own novel for the big screen.

After an infectious fungus kills everyone in a small town in Australia, the US military takes it and puts it in a facility in the Atchison Caves. Over the course of 20 years, the facility has been turned into a 24-hour self-storage unit. Due to environmental changes, the fungus starts to break out, just as Travis “Teacake” Meacham (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) work the night shift.

Koepp is a big-name screenwriter; he has worked on blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and the Indiana Jones series, and worked with top-tier directors like Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh. He goes in a different direction with Cold Storage since it was a tight B-movie in a restricted location. The premise was similar to the British film Storage 24, though Cold Storage was much better received.

Cold Storage was marketed as a comedy, and there was some comedy in the film, but there was an air of seriousness to it. The film was more of a gore fest because it has bodies exploding and the infected people spreading the fungus through vomit, like the infected in 28 Days Later. It was a gore fest that would play well with teenage audiences and the more unhinged. Cold Storage was more of a fun film than a funny film.

Cold Storage was a splasher fest in the vein of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson’s early films. It was a film about enjoying the carnage on screen. There were lots of pop culture references in Cold Storage. The most obvious was with The Last of Us, since the threat was a fungus that turned people into mindless zombies whose only purpose was to spread itself to new hosts. The fungus created a rat king, a group of rats stuck together, and players of The Last of Us Part II experienced battling a boss called The Rat King. The fungus infection mutated people into bloated monstrosities, and if they exploded, they would spread like the Flood did with their Carrier Forms in the Halo games. The body explosions felt similar to the Martians in Mars Attacks after they hear Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call.” All the violent mayhem makes Cold Storage a good film for teenagers. Although I enjoyed most of the on-screen death, I didn’t like what happened to the cat. Humans blowing up, great to see, a cat blowing up was traumatic.

For a film with a B-movie premise and approach, it did have a star-studded cast. Georgina Campbell has shown herself to be a scream queen thanks to roles in Barbarian, Bird Box Barcelona, and The Watchers, and Joe Keery has had major TV roles in Stranger Things and Fargo. They had a fun dynamic as they developed a friendship. Campbell was notable because her character was smart and mischievous, and acted as a bad influence on Keery’s Travis. The biggest name in the cast was Liam Neeson, who played an army officer who had experience dealing with the fungus and was racing to get to Kansas. There was prestigious casting thanks to Vanessa Redgrave and Lesley Manville. Manville’s role was unexpected since she played a chain-smoking ex-army officer who was a wisecracking badass. It was great to see her in something different to her usual regal British roles. Due to Cold Storage being filmed in Italy and Morocco, most of the cast were British and Irish.

Cold Storage was directed by Jonny Campbell, whose only film credit was the Ant and Dec comedy Alien Autopsy, and has mostly worked on TV shows ranging from Ashes to Ashes to Doctor Who to Westworld. He brought visual flair to the film, even if the CGI didn’t match his imagination. There were some great montages with upbeat music in the background. This film had one of the best uses of roach cam. Whilst the tone was light, the threat was real: anyone infected with the fungus suffered a horrible fate, and the world would be in danger if the fungus was able to break out beyond the facility. This horror was highlighted early in the film because the first person was shown to be infected: all it took was a small hole in their boot for them to become infected, and they took drastic action when they realised what was happening to them.

Cold Storage was mostly a straightforward film; there was a deeper throughline about American military bureaucracy. It gave the film a slight satirical edge as the American military handles crises by passing the buck, ignoring them, or waiting long enough to forget.