Movies & TV Cold Storage Cold Storage Is a Fun Midnight Movie that Needs More Midnight Movie Energy But we still get a lot of exploding alien fungus, never fear. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: StudioCanal Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: StudioCanal First things first: Is this is a Disclosure Day prequel? Because that film’s screenwriter, David Koepp, also wrote this screenplay, based on his 2019 novel, and the deer are, as in the latest Disclosure Day trailer, up to some weird shit. Beyond that I will try not to say anything spoilery about the deer, or most of the plot after the first ten minutes or so, because this is a film that twists, turns, allows shenanigans to ensue, and sets a lot of different people on wacky collision courses, and I don’t want to give any of the fun away. Cold Storage begins as a tense, creepy sci-fi-tinged outbreak story, set about 15 years in our past. A space probe has crashed back to earth, and it looks like some of the samples that were sent up have come back… wrong. Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), and Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon),  are sent in to assess and contain the situation, but naturally things don’t go as planned. The film brings us up to present day, with the civilization-ending fungus in a storage facility built atop the (real life) Atchison Caves in Kansas, where it’s unknowingly guarded by Teacake (Joe Keery), and Naomi (Georgina Campbell). Because, you see, at a certain point the military sold the warehouse off and now it’s a private storage facility, full of people who have no idea what lurks beneath them. Teacake and Naomi have both taken this mind-numbing, low-paying job in a bid to reset their lives. When they find themselves in a gross-out horror movie they try to adapt, but they’re still just normal people trying to survive, not seasoned action heroes like Quinn and Romano. (I will say, as a slight ding, that the two of them do wayyy too well with this situation, but if they were realistically incompetent and terrified there’d be no movie.) Meanwhile, of course, there is a collection of people who all have reasons to be at the storage facility at the worst possible time, and they range from Vanessa Redgrave in a role that achieves a strange poignancy to an especially hapless biker gang. Cold Storage is the kind of movie that ideally you’d stumble across at 2am on HBO, right when everyone at the sleepover was about to actually sleep, to keep everyone awake and giggling for another two hours. Screenwriter/novelist David Koepp is a legend, obviously, but he also wrote two of my favorite movies of last year (Presence and Black Bag) and one of my least favorite (Jurassic World Rebirth). He’s behind the script for Spielberg’s upcoming  Disclosure Day (which I’m excited for both because its Spielberg’s return to aliens, and the trailers indicate that Josh O’Connor will spend the film feeling emotions he can only express through his kind, kind eyes) and I’m seriously wondering if Cold Storage was an early exploration of ideas for that film. The way Cold Storage uses animals, especially deer, is impressively creepy and unsettling. Director Jonny Campbell will possibly be best known to readers of this site as the director of Doctor Who’s “Vincent and the Doctor” (sorry if you just started crying), and was also behind the TV movie Eric and Ernie, and his previous theatrical feature, also a horror comedy, 2006’s Alien Autopsy. The acting is uniformly great. The bad guys are silly and over the top, but not so over the top that they become scary in a way that would outweigh the fungal threat. Georgina Campbell is fun in a role that riffs on Tess in Barbarian without ever being too on-the-nose. Joe Keery is ridiculously appealing as a kind of working class Robert Pattinson, occasionally verging on wacky but never so much that Teacake becomes a caricature. There are real people inside both Naomi and Teacake, and Campbell and Keery allow them to show, especially in the film’s first act. Ellora Torchia is solid as the only reasonable, sane person in a government bureaucracy, and makes the creakiest part of the movie work so well you barely notice the exposition. But maybe best of all are Leslie Manville and Liam Neeson, who ground the film as the two people who know how much danger the world is in, but are also grizzled and sarcastic about it. It’s fun and inventive, but I found myself wishing Campbell and Koepp had stretched even more. I haven’t read Koepp’s novel, but in the film there’s an interesting class element woven into both Teacake and Naomi’s stories—and they talk about that a little bit, but I wanted a more. More loneliness underneath Teacake’s need to fill every silence with chatter. More rawness in Naomi’s life as a single mom finally trying to pursue the degree she wanted years ago, and stuck at a crummy job to make it work. There’s a fun poking at ageism as well, in the way Romano and Quinn come together to be bad asses in their 70s. And there is a lot of splatter and goo. Where I think Cold Storage is stronger is in its matter-of-fact acceptance of climate collapse—and collapse in general. The fungus only becomes a problem because, first, the U.S. government doesn’t take its stewardship seriously enough. The warehouse, that becomes a storage facility, that is then guarded by underpaid, exhausted workers who cannot possibly take over the care of something so sensitive, shows the us the gradual breakdown of infrastructure rather than lecturing about it. And second, the fungus is only able to break containment because the environment has warmed up enough to reawaken it—a process that is made lethally worse by the violent and unpredictable storms that have become a common feature of life in the Midwest. No one debates this fact, it’s just a backdrop to the emergency. I also thought a lot about the latest Toxic Avenger. That movie went for a splattercore midnight movie vibe, but with the serious undercurrent that humble punk janitor Winston Gooze only becomes Toxie because he’s trying to expose a corrupt chemical company that’s destroying the environment and exposing his community to, well, toxic waste—and he only does that in retaliation when they refuse to cover his brain cancer treatment, and he doesn’t want to leave his stepkid an orphan. Heady shit for a Troma production! But as with that film, I think Cold Storage needed to be even more extreme with the gore. The aftereffects of the fungus are horrifying, yes, and the makeup is fantastic, but I think the movie needed to really drip with green vomit—the way it would have if it was made in 1980s by B-movie vigilantes with part-time actors and no permits. I get the sense that filmmakers think today’s audiences are more squeamish or prudish than their parents, but are they, really, or have they just grown up in a world overflowing with Marvel’s CGI oatmeal? Because in my (fairly full) theater, everyone reacted to every bit of green vomit and deer weirdness. Society only collapses if we let it, people—which is kind of the deeper message of Cold Storage? Bring more midnight movie energy into the world, commit to the splatter, let’s turn this ship around.[end-mark] The post <em>Cold Storage</em> Is a Fun Midnight Movie that Needs More Midnight Movie Energy appeared first on Reactor.