Dir: Jonny Campbell | Cast: Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell | Comedy Horror 99′

Reviewed by Ian Long

“Why did they go down into the cellar?”

It’s a question that hangs over lots of horror films. Whatmakes people voluntarily put themselves in the way ofdangers that we, the audience, can see coming a mile off?

In Jonny Campbell’s comedy-horror Cold Storage, the question takes the specific form of “why did Naomi and Teacake climb down a ladder with a terrifying 400-foot vertical drop into pitch darkness after hearing a weird noise(and do it twice in the course of the film)?”

Travis ‘Teacake’ Meacham and Naomi Williams are junior employees at a self-storage facility in rural Kansas. He’s a sweet but mixed-up kid, on probation after being drawn into a minor crime. She’s a feisty single ‘mom’ struggling with an absent, negligent baby daddy. But what is the nature of the menace they’re facing?

In the world of the story, the Skylab space station of the 1970s secretly hosted a ‘gain-of-function’ experiment in which a hazardous fungus was genetically altered to enhance traits like virulence and ease of spread (many now believe that the COVID virus stemmed from a similar experiment).

The film suggests that when Skylab crashed and disintegrated in 1979, active material from the experiment fell to earth in Australia. After a fatal breakout, the US government sealed a sample inside a vault and, in the intervening years, rented out the facility’s ground level section to a commercial outfit, Atchison Self-Storage: the very one where Naomi and Teacake now work.

All the while, the fungus continued to fester, half-forgotten, in its sub-sub-sub-basement. And now it’s beginning to infect people and animals around the facility, making them turn green and explode into spore-ridden gunk. Luckily Naomi and Teacake are immune to all this, because they exist in a ditzy rom-com realm of wry, cute expressions and flirtatious banter.But others in the film are less fortunate.

Take Mike, Naomi’s ex-boyfriend, who unaccountably turns up at the facility with Mr Scroggins, their pet cat, whom he has accidentally killed. He is pretty unpleasant even in normal life, and only gets worse when the fungus turns him into a hideous, jaw-clacking zombie. Equally, Griffin, the manager of the facility, is able to die because he’s ugly, sweaty and fat. His gang of disreputable biker friends, who’ve come to collect some knocked-off TVs, provide opportunities for further fun slayings.

My screening of Cold Storage featured people in gas masks and camouflage gear marching about the cinema and shining torches at the audience, which is appropriate for a film set in the US but shot in Italy and Morocco, featuring a largely British and Irish cast camouflaged as Americans. Leads Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery are upbeat and engaging, Liam Neeson tries to deliver a bit of credibility by pretending to take it all seriously, Lesley Manville is a glamorously unflappable biohazard operative and – in a bizarre, scarcely credible stroke – Vanessa Redgrave appears as an elderly lady visiting her self-storage unit in order to commit suicide and join her husband in death.

Nothing really adds up here. There’s no good reason for Naomi and Teacake to climb down the 400-foot ladder into the Vault of the Fungus. But it would be wrong to dismiss the film for this. It isn’t going for significance or even coherence, just popcorn entertainment. And it works well enough, delivering sufficient shocks, gross-outs and laughs – often all at the same time – to fulfil its brief.

Cold Storage reminded me of Slither (2006), a body horror parody which had a degree or two more style. But it boasts a competent script by Davd “third most successful screenwriter of all time“ Koepp, whose status may explain why it’s been made with a budget large enough to cover convincing visual effects and some well-known actors.

All told, Cold Storage doesn’t amount to much more than a lightly retooled version of the B-movies American teenagers used to watch at drive-ins in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But do bear it in mind next time you borrow your daddy’s T-Bird for a hot date.

IN UK CINEMAS 20 February 2026