'Cold Storage' Review: A Limp and Thoroughly Boring Horror-comedy That Wastes a Fun Premise
- 5 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - February 23, 2026
Filmed back in March 2023 and quietly sitting on a shelf ever since, Cold Storage finally limps into cinemas, and unfortunately, it feels like it should have stayed in storage. After his theatrical comeback with The Naked Gun, I was genuinely rooting for Liam Neeson to hit another unexpected genre lane. A horror-comedy creature feature with a government-sealed fungus outbreak? On paper, that’s pulpy fun waiting to happen. In reality, this is limp, messy and borderline worthless, the kind of mid-2010s VOD release you’d scroll past and forget instantly. There’s something deeply “2016” about it, and not in a nostalgic way.
There's a genuine promise to the premise of a mutating parasitic fungus escaping containment and turning humans into brain-controlled hosts, which is ripe for schlocky B-movie fun. But instead of feeling inventive, it plays like a patchwork of better genre efforts. The outbreak paranoia inevitably invites comparisons to The Last of Us and The Andromeda Strain, yet it lacks the dread, scientific intrigue or weight that made those stories compelling. It feels less like a fresh take and more like an extended cold open stretched to feature length.
The film never figures itself out. It wants to be a splattery horror-comedy throwback, but it’s too tame and flat to land as either scary or funny. Scenes lurch awkwardly between half-hearted wisecracks and half-baked tension. Some sequences drag with lifeless exposition, others rush through what should be escalation points. There’s no rhythm, no build, no satisfying payoffs, just a scattershot collection of moments stitched together. There's a real randomness here to it all that is baffling, like a colliding of sub stories that amount to nothing. There's a gang of bikers who want knock-off TVs, a boyfriend having a freakout who turns up to the storage facility after he accidentally killed his partner’s cat and Vanessa Redgrave quite literally turns up, falls asleep in one of the storage containers and wakes up in the last ten minutes. It's the most confusing mess of side-plots I've seen onscreen since Ella McCay.
The biggest disappointment, however, is the gore. For a film clearly aiming for retro creature-feature energy, the practical effects should have been a selling point. Instead, nearly all of it is cheap, weightless CGI. Bodies don’t grotesquely transform, they just pop into cartoonish digital splatter. Animals and humans alike either explode or vomit pixelated fungus with almost no variety in design. It’s lazy and repetitive, draining any sense of gross-out fun. When you’re chasing a schlocky vibe, practical ingenuity is half the appeal, and this simply doesn’t deliver. I spent the whole film expecting it to build up to something crazy and fun, which is teased throughout with an infected rat king, yet it never makes another appearance or mention after the opening half hour.
It doesn’t help that the film looks flat and lifeless. Though not technically a streaming original, it has that unmistakable mid-tier platform sheen of bland lighting, uninspired framing and an overall cheapness that undermines any attempt at atmosphere. Even the underground storage setting, which should feel claustrophobic and eerie, ends up looking like a half-dressed set on a tight schedule with absolutely no variety or creativity put into the settings.
There are fleeting moments where you glimpse what could have been. A couple of montages set to popular songs showing the fungus spreading across the globe have a pulpy, tongue-in-cheek charm. But they’re brief sparks in an otherwise dull runtime. The finale doesn’t redeem things either. Instead of escalating into glorious B-movie insanity, it fizzles out in a rushed, anticlimactic nosedive that feels like the production simply ran out of steam (or money). For a film about an uncontrollable outbreak, it’s shockingly devoid of energy.
The central duo (led by Joe Keery) don’t help matters. Keery, who can be effortlessly charming in the right role, is dialled up to a grating, try-hard pitch here. The constant quips, nervous rambling and exaggerated reactions quickly become exhausting rather than endearing, undercutting what little tension the film manages to build. Instead of feeling like a relatable everyman caught in an absurd situation, he comes off as an insufferable sitcom character dropped into the wrong film. His co-lead in Georgina Campbell fares slightly better, but the script gives neither much depth beyond surface-level archetypes. The supporting cast drift in and out without leaving much impression, just all varying degrees of annoying, stupid or fodder that includes Lesley Manville (reteaming with Neeson after 2019’s Ordinary Love), Sosie Bacon, Richard Brake and like I mentioned, the bizarre casting of Vanessa Redgrave.
And then there’s Liam Neeson. After an intriguing prologue, he’s side-lined into what feels like a glorified cameo, endlessly travelling toward the outbreak while engaging in dry, repetitive military phone calls. It becomes unintentionally funny how often the film cuts back to him en route, like a less compelling version of Scatman Crothers’ cross-country journey in The Shining. By the time he finally arrives, any sense of anticipation has long evaporated.
Cold Storage feels like actors marking time between better projects. It’s derivative, tonally confused, visually cheap and missing the practical-effects creativity that could have made it a fun viral horror-comedy. There’s a fun version of this concept somewhere in another universe, unfortunately it's not this one. A real waste of time, a big nothing of a film.
'Cold Storage' is out now in cinemas.
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