Flasz On Film

Based on David Koepp’s novel (and adapted for the screen by the man himself) and directed by Jonny Campbell, for whom this project marks a transition from mostly directing television, Cold Storage stars Georgina Campbell, whom you might remember from her turn in Barbarian, Joe Keery known as the asshole-turned-badass Steve from Stranger Things, and the patron saint of all dad movies, Liam Neeson himself. The story follows a small group of night shift workers at a self-storage facility, where a deadly fungus outbreak takes place because the self-storage place hides a secret government facility underneath it.

And at this point, a hundred-or-so words in, you probably still don’t have a scooby-doo about what to expect from this movie. After all, Koepp is the guy who wrote or co-wrote some of the biggest and most influential movies of the last thirty years (like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and many others), Campbell is a bit of a wild card with roots in British comedy and the cast is a veritable patchwork, and the movie as a sum total of its constituent parts is anything but their logical synthesis. Therefore, you just have to trust me: Cold Storage is way more fun than you probably think it would be based on looking at the poster or the trailer alone and it honestly is substantially more effective than it should be.

What it is, though, is a comedy-horror mishmash of tropes pulled out of zombie classics, splatter camp-fests, and cheap B-quality exploitation flicks from long ago… but already pre-filtered through a layer of awareness of genre satirists like Edgar Wright, Robert Rodriguez and Drew Goddard. And I did spend precious three seconds pontificating over the use of the term “comedy-horror” as opposed to horror-comedy by the way; and I ended up surmising that Cold Storage is first and foremost a comedy utilizing horror-derived tools, rather than a horror that happens to be funny.

Consequently, while the movie lacks the kind of visible and easily discernible movie IQ that Planet Terror, Shaun of the Dead or Cabin in the Woods had in spades, Cold Storage is just here to have fun on its own terms. The predicament itself must suffice in addition to tonnes and tonnes of innards, gore, green and pink goo, and all other sorts of thixotropic liquids generously poured in the direction of the camera and/or characters. It’s not quite self-aware enough to jolt the viewer into thinking that what they are watching is a meta-warped experiment in trying to deconstruct the genre, but it’s just about detached enough to make sure nobody would take what happens on the screen too seriously. This in turn allows some of the more technically serious actors in the cast, like Neeson (though we all know that Liam Neeson does have the chops to find his feet in a comedic setting, like in last year’s The Naked Gun for example), Lesley Manville and Vanessa Redgrave, to “let their hogs loose” and partake in a wholly ridiculous experiment that uses a horror template as an oversized blunt instrument of the kind a circus clown would use to elicit cheap laughs.

And it all kinda works. Cold Storage is a breezy and inoffensive piece of genre filmmaking that knows how not to drive too deep into the horror territory, which makes all of its plentiful gross-out moments come across as cute and fundamentally funny. Which also may or may not include vomiting deer. Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell have been paired rather well as an unlikely couple of misfits who are confronted with a super-fungus that defies all laws of physics and makes its host do totally obscene things to ensure it would spread onto new unsuspecting victims: from climbing onto roofs to commit suicide to exploding spontaneously in fountains of infectious fungal sludge. The plot is just about sufficiently convenient to register as camp and a tiny bit stupid while never truly prompting the viewer to reject it either. And it is all held together with a solid helping of modern-looking splatter. In fact, this is probably where my only major gripe can be pinned because a movie like this would have benefited vastly from traditional practical gore and blood effects instead of CGI, which even in 2026 looks quite jarring.

Alas, Cold Storage could have been a modern-day spiritual descendant of Peter Jackson-meets-Troma filmmaking philosophy and in fairness, it was only a few cards short of a straight flush in this regard. But no matter. Not every movie needs to reinvent the genre or twist its own underpinnings into a double windsor knot before tying it around a deliberately conventional narrative framework. Cold Storage is one of those films that doesn’t try to imitate Edgar Wright or Drew Goddard by attempting an elevated genre commentary and instead absorbs their work as part of its own DNA and simply crafts a comedy that looks very distantly related to something George A. Romero, Stuart Gordon, Peter Jackson or Lucio Fulci.

As a result, the film’s featherlight gait and a fundamentally comedic approach to splatter makes the whole experience function on a level that invites not only splatter hounds to have fun, but also general audiences who might not know what to expect from a film that casually winks at this specific tradition. It’s more or less a low-fat people-friendly substitute that may or may not serve as a gateway drug for those who liked what Cold Storage had to offer to go on and explore The Toxic Avenger films, Dead Alive or The Crazies. But even this is not a given because Koepp and Campbell were probably just happy enough to craft a movie that is as close to a four-quadrant product as possible while still working close enough to a micro-genre that typically attracts a small and dedicated cohort of fans.

In sum, having fun with Cold Storage is surprisingly easy. Looking for depth of character within it though, is a whole another matter and it is best not attempted at all. Some movies are perhaps best enjoyed as they are, and even though they fit into a strict genre tradition that could potentially inspire one to look for connections and references, nobody expects you to read between the lines in here. The lines are just about fun enough.