A pair of low-paid security guards stumble upon a space virus threatening to break out of containment after 20 years underground in Cold Storage, opening in Prague cinemas this weekend after debuting stateside earlier this month. There’s a delicate balance that horror-comedies must maintain to succeed, but Cold Storage manages to be both shocking and funny without selling out on either genre, and rates alongside films like Tremors, Slither, and Attack the Block at the top of its class.
Directed by Jonny Campbell from the screenplay by David Koepp (based on his novel), Cold Storage leads with an opening scrawl detailing the real-life decommissioning of Skylab in 1979. The space station was apparently carrying tanks full of infectious material for space study—one of which landed in rural Australia after the rest of the station burned up on re-entry, where a farmer retrieved it and fashioned it as a tourist attraction.
Two decades later, the attraction goes literally viral and biochemist Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) fields a call from an infected resident before the town of 12 goes quiet. She travels to the location to obtain a safe sample (for some reason), while U.S. bioterror operatives Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) join her on a mission to incinerate the entire locale to prevent further outbreak.
Cold Storage‘s 15-minute cold open instantly evokes thoughts of The Andromeda Strain with its hazmat-suited scientists exploring an abandoned town, and Tremors as the trio confront a desert menace and find bodies on higher ground. There’s a vein of dry comedy here—largely established through Neeson’s deadpan sarcasm—but the narrative takes a genuinely shocking turn that feels like something inspired by Steven Soderbergh‘s pandemic classic Contagion.
The rest of the film doesn’t quite reach the highs promised by this dynamite opening, which takes its central threat more seriously than most films of this type, but it maintains an appropriate tone throughout. It takes place twenty years later at the small-town U.S. storage facility that has become home to a sample of the infectious material retrieved from Australia—which has now become a self-storage facility following government cutbacks.
Here, employees Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell) do some investigating after hearing a rogue beeping sound behind some drywall. It relates to a rising temperature in the underground cold storage facility after a series of earthquakes. After fielding a call from military helpdesk officer Abigail (Ellora Torchia), Neeson’s no-nonsense Quinn is also sprung into action.
Also around to up the body count: Gavin Spokes as facility manager Griffin, who brings a group of biker pals by to lift some merchandise from a storage unit. And, why not, the legendary Vanessa Redgrave as a client who visits a unit to pay respects to her dead husband. Redgrave is delightful to see here; we only wish the narrative gave her character something to do.
Neeson continues his unexpected and highly welcome late-career pivot into straight-faced absurdism following last year’s The Naked Gun, and once again leans into inspired Leslie Nielsen-style comedy. Quinn’s no-nonsense authority figure feels spiritually closer to Nielsen’s turn in Airplane!—the more serious Neeson delivers his lines, the harder they land. Keery (Stranger Things) and Campbell (Barbarian) also make for appealing leads, grounding the escalating chaos with performances that feel human even as the situation becomes increasingly ridiculous.
Director Campbell keeps Cold Storage humming at an efficient clip, never lingering long enough for a joke to wear thin or for the premise to strain credulity. But most importantly, he maintains that careful tonal balance: the movie is frequently very funny, but it never undermines the danger at its core. Campbell’s only previous feature was the underrated 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy; two decades later, it’s nice to see him follow up with a sure hand.
Grossout special effects are another highlight, as zombified victims stagger forward as walking incubators, desperate to infect others by vomiting viscous green bile or detonating into splattering fountains of goo. The practical makeup work on the human cast is impressively tactile, lending weight to the carnage; aside from some jittery CGI animals, the commitment to physical effects, including Aaron Heffernan’s memorably unpleasant transformation as Naomi’s ex, gives Cold Storage much of its queasy charm.
Cold Storage does not aim to reinvent the genre, but it does deliver tightly paced, well-performed, and gleefully gross entertainment. Within its modest ambitions, it ranks among the more satisfying recent entries in the horror-comedy space; while it’s unlikely to find much of an audience in cinemas early this year, it deserves to become at least a minor cult hit once it reaches streaming services.
