2026 Cold Storage

• Director: Jonny Campbell
• Writers: David Koepp
• Stars: Georgina Campbell, Joe Keery, and Liam Neeson
• Runtime: 99 minutes
• YouTube Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWhxkiqrh0Q

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

A semi-retired bioterrorism agent gets called back into action with his sidekick when a deadly fungus gets on the loose. Throw a couple of civilians into the mix, and hilarity ensues. This one has lots of humor and body horror. It’s juicy and gross.

Everything was well done, and it’s entertaining, but it’s not super original. There’s a lot here we’d seen before.

Spoilery Synopsis

We’re told about Skylab, and the debris that mostly burned up in orbit. Some of it hit the Earth.

In Western Australia, 18 years ago, Enos rushes to make a phone call. Dr. Martins in Rome gets the call. “Something came out of your tank! We’re all dying!” The tank is NASA’s, and she doesn’t know much about it. 27 hours later, she arrives there to investigate. Robert Quinn arrives on the scene with Romano; they’re military of some sort. There was an O2 tank from Skylab that fell down here, but it had a parasitic fungus on it. We sent it up there in the first place, but what came down wasn’t the same thing.

The three check out the small town where the “outbreak” has taken place. There are no people. They soon find the tank and check it out. Dr. Martins quickly figured out what happened. Someone was trying to clean the tank and accidentally fed the thing inside. The creature finds its way into her through a hole in her boot. Then they find all the townspeople on the roofs of the buildings, dead.

Quinn calls in the military to burn the town to the ground. Martins has one sample in her back, and another in her foot. It acts really fast and takes over her mind. She shoots herself. As credits roll, the town is destroyed and the sample is taken to a secret research facility where it’s put into Cold Storage.

Years pass, and the facility shuts down and is eventually sold. Teacake drives to the new self-storage facility, which is the re-tasked cold storage place from before. He works security there, and his boss, Griffin, wants to do something illegal. He talks to Naomi, a new employee about how awful this job is.

An old woman comes in and wants to access her unit. She goes into the unit and finds her gun; this is her anniversary, and she’s thinking of shooting herself. She takes a nap first.

In North Carolina, Robert Quinn gets a phone call about the Skylab tank. There’s an alarm about a temperature change at the storage facility. He’s soon on the way to the facility.

Teacake and Naomi hear a beeping inside the wall and want to investigate. They break open the wall and see the same alarm that Quinn was notified about. There’s a whole wall of control-panel stuff back there. Naomi wants to explore the place’s sub-sub-basement, where the lab is. It takes a while, but they get there.

Naomi’s crazy boyfriend Mike drives up outside, and he’s more or less a stalker now. He calls her, but she doesn’t get the message due to being so far underground. Also, he’s got someone dead in the trunk of his car. It’s not a body, it’s a cat who appears to be infected. It climbs to the roof and explodes a load of spores that infect Mike, a deer, and gets the ball rolling.

Naomi and Teacup open the vault and go inside. They find an infected “rat king” on the ground. They nope right out and head back upstairs.

Quinn talks to Abigail and Jerabek, who explains that the man in charge of the cold storage unit died a year and a half ago. Jerabek is in charge now, but he doesn’t believe there’s any real problem here. Abigail takes it more seriously and wants to help Quinn.

We get a flashback to several years ago as the fungus broke out. It infected a cockroach just a few hours ago that got outside and into Mike’s trunk and the dead cat. Meanwhile, Naomi and Teacup watch the infected deer, which explodes. Mike shows up, and he’s acting very strangely. He starts shooting, which wakes up old Mrs. Rooney, who was asleep in her unit. Naomi calls the government agency whose name was on the vault door.

Quinn lands and meets with Romano, from the old days, and they have equipment to pick up. They get Naomi’s call. Naomi and Teacup argue about whether or not zombies are real. Outside, Quinn’s criminal friends arrive to steal stuff. They come upon the deer carcass and the hole in the wall. Ironhead, The Rev, Garbage, Cuba, and Dr. Friedman come inside to loot 4K TVs.

Mike finds and pukes all over Cuba, Garbage, and Ironhead. The Rev hears the action and just drives away. Old lady Rooney shoots Mike in the head, causing him to explode.

Teacup and Naomi get outside and run into Quinn, who has a mini-nuke. He gives the young couple hazmat suits and sends them down to the lab to place the nuke. Quinn stays outside to kill anyone who tries to leave the building. When they get down to the lab, they find that the timer is already counting down. Can they make it out in time?

Teacup, Naomi, Quinn, and Romano limp to the car and try to get away from the blast.

The bomb goes off, and it’s a BIG one. It turns the whole facility into a mile-wide crater.

Some time passes, and Abigail visits Quinn in the hospital. Naomi and Teacup are a thing now.

We then cut to another deer in the wild that explodes into green stuff.

Brian’s Commentary

It’s got loads of fairly big stars and recognizable faces in it. It takes zombie action, contagion action, and a little “Die Hard” action and mixes it all up with fun characters and a crazy setting. There’s not much new here, but it combines old tropes into a fun mix.

It’s billed as a horror comedy, but it didn’t seem all that comedic to me. It was good, though.

Kevin’s Commentary

I thought the casting was especially good in this one. It’s well made, but a bit formulaic. Everything is well done, but I didn’t feel like there was a lot new here that I hadn’t already seen before. It was entertaining though.