If exploding zombies are your thing…
Cold Storage is the latest iteration of the fad for fungus zombies, which seem to be still in vogue. This time, they’re the result of a medical experiment that was once aboard Skylab and everyone forgot about until it escaped an oxygen tank that fell on Australia. In an extended prologue, we witness the disaster that happened two decades ago when a comically understaffed team of experts went to contain the mutated organism and lost one member in the most gruesome way. This is the type of fungus that takes over the nervous system and compels the victim to seek a location for optimal dissemination. That’s scary enough, but on top of that, the infection ends up blowing up your guts all around you. The movie delights in showing the many ways this can deform a cadaver.
Another member of that ill-fated team, played by Liam Neeson, suffers an unspecified back injury that conveniently keeps him out of the main action in the present, when the military building that kept the last sample of the zombie fungus (now decommissioned and repainted as a self-storage facility) has a minor electrical mishap with catastrophic cascading effects: a freezer malfunctions, the fungus starts growing again, it breaks containment, and it climbs up the food chain until it becomes a problem for humans. Liam Neeson is dragged back from retirement to save the day again, but he spends most of the movie traveling to the site of the crisis, and most of the rest of the movie lying on the floor because his broken back can’t handle gunfire recoil. Why do you even hire Liam Neeson to not let him do Liam Neeson stuff escapes me.
Instead, our heroes are Joe Keery, fresh from saving the world in Stranger Things, and horror veteran Georgina Campbell, whose character is very tired of running from monsters and just wants to hide and wait. These two stumble into the whole world-ending menace because they’re bored and decide to investigate a weird noise in the self-storage facility where they work the night shift, and discover the alarm that was triggered by the broken freezing system. Meanwhile, the fungus has already spread to the local fauna, and when the shambling victims cross paths with our heroes, it’s time for them to run for their lives.
It helps that they have more plot armor than Bugs Bunny. The fungus zombies repeatedly ooze, spittle, burst open and projectile-vomit their gooey innards right next to our heroes, and somehow not one drop of infected material splashes onto them. When you consider that this fungus has been shown to be able to penetrate cement and metal, the protagonists’ eventual survival can only be explained because their names are on the poster and aren’t allowed to die. So the gore quota is met by an array of secondary characters established as unpleasant enough for it to be OK to enjoy watching them suffer the most spectacularly messy deaths. This movie has a lot of fun with zombie makeup, and even more fun with throwing zombie guts at every surface.
Cold Storage is the kind of supremely silly flick that demands out loud that you switch off your brain. There’s no point in pausing to question the multiple instances of military bureaucratic dysfunction that it must have taken for this plot to happen. Don’t expect any implied reflection on the problem of badly maintained public infrastructure or the irresponsibility of storing hazardous materials near civilian areas (one character has a small atom bomb hidden in a house with children, and it’s treated as a nonissue). Just sit and savor the spectacle of a screen smeared with squishy rotten organs. Hey, the world is ending anyway, right?
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
