Cold Storage Review: Horror Comedy Moves Too Quick to Get Moldy

If you’ve never been to a government surplus sale, I can fully recommend the experience. You never know what you’ll find: old electronics, used furniture, pre-worn clothing, and maybe even a former secret military base in which NASA left a mutant fungus that could eradicate the world.

Well, having once found a watch in a secondhand chest of drawers, I can see how that could happen.

That’s the slightly ridiculous setup to Cold Storage, a horror comedy that’s light on the horror and heavier on the comedy in which night watch staff Naomi (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian, Krypton) and Travis (Joe Kerry, Stranger Things, Spree)  find a mysterious network of tunnels under the military bunker-turned-unit rental where they work. Locked in a temperature-controlled laboratory in the lowest sub-basement is a fungus that fell to Earth on Skylab in 1979. Said fast-spreading and very deadly growth has already wiped out the population of a small Australian town before being scooped up by American scientists/soldiers and locked in that fancy basement. Of course, no one took power failures and global warming into account before selling off the bunker. Decades later the fungus is greasily spreading its green, gooey spores onto anyone unfortunate enough to open a storage locker and turn them into mind-controlled spore spreaders. Of course, the completely ill-prepared pairing of Naomi and Travis are the ones who stumble across it first. Luckily for them, the aging Col. Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) is now heading their way, assisted via the phone by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), the one person at high command who believes his crazy story about world-threatening gloop.

No one in Australia seems overly concerned about a bunch of American soldiers and scientists stealing space debris and then bombing a town in the Outback to eradicate the menace, but that’s the least of Cold Storage’s troubles. There’s a clash between the Slithers-esque tone of the script by David Koepp (adapting his own 2016 novel) and the more restrained comedic approach of director Jonny Campbell. Luckily, Neeson can navigate that weird middle ground, showing the same silly-smart sensibilities he perfected for The Naked Gun. He takes particular glee in having his aging special forces operative impaired by a bad back, milking as much comedic delight from that simple idea as he can.

While Campbell is definitely adept in the gory side of the story, it’s in the more understated moments between Keery and Campbell that he seems most at ease as a director. They never reach the silly buddy heights of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as Tremors’ down-at-the-heels handymen, but they’re not really given the time to build that energy up. The Australian rescue mission serves as a lengthy pre-credit chapter that introduces the fungus, and showcases some of the wonderfully ugly creature designs, but it never feels essential.

Those creature designs are quite inspired, especially since whenever modern audiences think of fungal zombification they’ll automatically envision the dusty spores of The Last of Us. Instead, Cold Storage goes for a bubbling, squelching effect, and the infected humans become shambling messes, ready to pop and spread the infection.

The best moments are when Keery and Campbell get to be blue collar schlubs facing down these messy menaces. Maybe if there was more of their back-and-forth and less of Neeson and Torchia’s distant double act, or vice versa, then Cold Storage might balance between its gruesome and goofy aspects. Veteran scriptwriter Koepp has been on a resurgence recently with his trio of films with Steven Soberbergh – Kimi, Presence, and Black Bag – but Cold Storage is more mixed bag than black bag, missing beats and opportunities in the same fashion as his workmanlike script for Jurassic World Rebirth. Luckily, there’s just enough of those entertaining moments to mean it may well grow on you.

This article appears in February 13 • 2026.