Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Not sure what I really expected from ‘Cold Storage’, but the trailer for this horror film is so kick-ass, it could make any horror fan anticipate a wildly entertaining survival story packed with blood, gore, and screams. And while there’s certainly some of that, the film also wastes several precious minutes simply showing two night guards chatting away about this and that.
Director Jonny Campbell and writer David Koepp offer an interesting enough premise: two night guards, Teacake (Joe Keery) and Naomi (Georgina Campbell), discover something sinister spreading through the storage facility where they work. As the mysterious substance turns people around them into monsters, former bioterrorism agent Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) is called in to contain it before it spreads beyond the facility. But can the unlikely trio stop the outbreak and make it out alive?
‘Cold Storage’ opens with a flashback to the early 2000s, when Quinn was an active Pentagon operative sent to investigate a deadly mutated fungus brought back from space, with his colleague Trini Romano (Lesley Manville) and biochemist Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon) in a small town in Western Australia. They realize most of the town is dead and manage to contain the fungus. Fast-forward to the present day, and the dangerous fungus is sitting sealed in an underground government facility in Kansas, part of which has since been leased to a private storage company. Obviously, the long-forgotten threat doesn’t stay contained for very long.
There are so many potentially fun elements in Cold Storage, and the cast is talented, but the film’s pacing is slow, there’s barely any tension, and the jump scares are plain dumb. Joe Keery’s Teacake is chatty, funny, and basically a mildly tweaked version of his Stranger Things character, while Georgina Campbell’s Naomi is the smarter cookie, quick to figure out whom to call when things go south. The filmmakers may have been having a little meta fun by letting the actors play variations of their familiar screen personas. Liam Neeson, for instance, gets to channel his Taken character and just about every other gruff, protective action hero he’s played over the years.
In a year that has given us outbreak horror films like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Colony, and Resident Evil (even if fans are divided on them), Cold Storage feels like something made two decades too late. Perhaps this film would’ve been more entertaining back in 2007, but by today’s standards, it’s a sluggish affair, with characters who barely get a chance to shine and infected creatures that are more sloppy and disgusting than frightening.
Rating: 5 out of 10. Watch ‘Cold Storage’ on Prime Video.
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