Cold Storage info:
Director: Jonny Campbell
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, and Liam Neeson
Intro
Hello and welcome to another week here at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com. Softball season is in full swing (pun intended), so that means busier evenings than usual. But that also means lots of outside time in the beautiful weather we’ve been having. The only downside is finding time to spend a couple of hours indoors watching a new movie. Once the weather changes for the better, it’s a little easier to pull off, but in the meantime, we must make do with what we have.
This week, my wife and I finally got to watch a new movie that I’ve been trying to find for a few weeks. “Cold Storage” (Directed by Jonny Campbell) is still a fairly new release, so I was surprised to find it available to rent on Amazon already. Plus, with it only being $5.99, I thought it was quite the steal. But before I get too far into this, let me get my spoiler warning out of the way. If you don’t want to know what happens in this movie, I would go back to my homepage here. From there, you can check out some of the other reviews I have waiting for your eager eyes. For everyone else, let’s open up this story and see what we have.
Cold Storage Recap
During the flashback opening sequence, we get the backstory of what this will be about. Robert Quinn (Neeson) and his partner Trini (Lesley Manville) show up to investigate a dangerous fungus outbreak. It gets mostly destroyed, but a small sample gets put into cold storage in the sub-basement of a government facility. Then we fast-forward to the present day, where this building is now a self-storage company for civilians, and the cold storage area has been blocked off.
The two main characters, Travis (Keery) and Naomi (Campbell), are night guards, and Naomi is a fairly new employee. When they start to investigate a beeping sound, it takes them first behind a wall (that they tear down), then to the fourth sub-level of the basement. Here, they find some crazy pile of rats that are being taken over by the fungus. They decide not to proceed any further and head back up.
While this is going on, we see that “Cold Storage” is about to ramp up. The fungus escapes the basement by attaching itself to a roach. It then climbs all the way out and infects a cat, a deer, and Naomi’s ex-husband. All three of them get infected extremely quickly and try to get near other people before they explode. The explosion helps the fungus spread.
In the middle of all of this, Robert gets called back into action to help stop the spread once again. This time, Trini and he are assisted by Abigail (who works in the military). She wants to do the right thing, so she becomes his woman on the inside. He shows up with a mini-nuke and helps Travis and Naomi devise a plan to destroy the fungus.
In the end, “Cold Storage” has a pretty happy ending with the fungus getting nuked (but did they get all of it?) Travis, Naomi, Robert, and Trini all make it out alive, and even their asshole boss isn’t around anymore for them to deal with.
My thoughts on Cold Storage
This had such a quick run in the theaters that I didn’t get a chance to see it when it was first released. So, I jumped at the chance to watch it on the cheap through Amazon. This was wildly different from what I expected, but it’s also right up my alley, and I can appreciate both sides of that. It was funny, gory, had some great actors, and kept me entertained.
Now, I’m not saying it was perfect; it had its share of issues. For starters, I know it’s a movie, but you really think a government would sell a building and leave a deadly virus in cold storage? It’s just a movie, and I can suspend reality a bit, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story. But just in general, I thought a lot of the writing was a little lazy, as it relied on many things that we’ve seen in films before. This wasn’t exactly a zombie movie, but they even made fun of it themselves at one point.
The good news is that even with the writing being what it was, the makers of “Cold Storage” did a really good job with making and casting it. Not that there were any Oscar-worthy performances to call home about, the cast that was chosen did a good job with their roles. Both Keery and Campbell played off one another very nicely. Adding in Neeson gave it sort of a dark humor vibe that I loved to go along with the horror.
The graphics also weren’t top of the line, but again, in a movie like this, I thought they did the job that fit perfectly with what we were watching. It was also very compact at a very tight 1 hour and 39 minutes; it didn’t take them long to get to the meat of the plot. I do feel like a few scenes were shorter than they could have been. However, watching something like “Cold Storage”, I also very much appreciated the shorter run time.
Overall, I went back-and-forth with this one (as if you couldn’t tell). I really enjoyed it, but at the same time, there is a lot that could be better. Maybe another watch in the future may help me settle the rating more, but in the meantime, this was fun enough to warrant a 7 out of 10.
Watch or wait?
Well, since it’s already available to watch at home, I guess you’ve already waited. So the question becomes, should I rent it or wait for it to show up on one of my many streaming services? The answer is… It’s only $5 right now, so why not have some fun at home and watch this right now?
Ok, that’s it for me this week. That means it’s your turn now. I really want to know what you thought about “Cold Storage”. Did you go back and forth as much as I did when you tried to formulate any opinions on this? Where did you settle at the end of that conversation with yourself? Let me know in the comments, and I will be back next week with another mindless movie review of some sort.
