{"id":294286,"date":"2026-02-12T13:54:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294286\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T13:54:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T13:54:07","slug":"covid-fears-defrost-in-silly-splatter-fest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294286\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID fears defrost in silly splatter-fest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even accounting for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.avclub.com\/joe-keery-is-a-ridesharing-serial-killer-in-the-gory-tr-1844493492\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the time<\/a> Joe Keery fed his rideshare passengers to slavering junkyard dogs, the actor\u2019s \u201caw shucks\u201d lovability is constitutional to his screen persona. The assembly of guileless young men he\u2019s played since breaking out in 2016 with Stranger Things give his career a strong throughline, leading up to his role in Jonny Campbell\u2019s Cold Storage. It should be neither a surprise nor a disappointment that Keery\u2019s character here is a Golden Retriever in an industrial work shirt. That\u2019s what we\u2019re here for\u2014as well as pandemic-influenced gross-out horror, where the most squeamish person in the audience will only puke half as much as the characters and wildlife on screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>At face value, Cold Storage feels three years too late to the party. COVID zombie movies and isolated dramas have been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.avclub.com\/eddington-covid-cinema\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">fixtures for half a decade<\/a>. Right now, horror\u2019s chief fixations include male carnal predation (a la Nosferatu, though one could make its case as a COVID allegory, too), bodily autonomy (Shelby Oaks, Companion), and mortality\u2019s cruel vagaries (Final Destination Bloodlines, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pastemagazine.com\/movies\/osgood-perkins\/the-monkey-osgood-perkins-stephen-king-review\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The Monkey<\/a>). Viral horror is a tertiary concern at best. But if public health researchers have their eyes glued to the horizon for the next pandemic, then Cold Storage argues that horror should, too.<\/p>\n<p>The story opens 18 years in the past, with government operatives Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trinny Romano (Lesley Manville) arriving in Australia to aid Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon), a doctor called to the region by the threat of bacterial peril: A space-faring vessel has crash-landed to Earth and carries with it a particularly nasty fungal parasite capable of mind-controlling its hosts, The Last Of Us style. Quinn and Romano manage to contain it, ship it to the United States, and store it far underground in a military bunker that, over the next decade, falls into disuse and is remade as a self-storage facility, where paying customers unknowingly lock away their private assets next to national secrets.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Enter Keery. As Travis, a lowly and lonely employee of said facility, he\u2019s a schlemiel: not the person who spills the soup at dinner, but the one whose lap the soup falls on. He\u2019s a nice guy, just unlucky. His unctuous boss, Griffin (Gavin Spokes), brings on a new hire, Naomi (Georgina Campbell), which lifts Travis\u2019 spirits, especially as they start to hit it off. But a bummer development lies in store: The fungus is among us, having burst out of captivity and oozed its way above ground. Cats. Deer. Rats. Naomi\u2019s unstable ex-husband, Mike (Aaron Heffernan). No one\u2019s safe from the fungus\u2019 influence, and the viewer isn\u2019t safe from the goopy misadventures that follow its escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to imagine Cold Storage without Keery, not because no other actor alive could\u2019ve played Travis, but because David Koepp\u2019s script seems to be informed by the star\u2019s involvement. His chemistry with Campbell, another gleaming gem in the contemporary crop of horror actors, lends itself to organic chuckles, the kind you get from a meet-cute in a space as unlikely as a self-storage warehouse that happens to house zombifying goo. But Koepp\u2019s more overt punchlines tend to hinge on Travis\u2019 nervous, naive energy, which Quinn (back to help) receives as an invitation to growl at him to shut up. The jokes work\u2014this is another reminder after <a href=\"https:\/\/www.avclub.com\/the-naked-gun-review\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The Naked Gun<\/a> that Neeson has terrific comic timing\u2014but mostly because of Keery\u2019s chipperness.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But the stars provide the film\u2019s best effects. It\u2019s no crime to rely on CGI in a splattery monster flick like Cold Storage. Certain sequences even require it. But back in 2006, James Gunn\u2019s emetic Slither benefited from its extensive use of puppetry and prosthetics, so Jonny Campbell\u2019s overwhelming preference for digital visuals 20 years later is a disappointment. Like the gags, the effects work well enough, and are happily offset by the story\u2019s tone, fully entrenched in silly splatter-fest territory after a tense and decidedly more grounded opening, as if Campbell and Koepp intend to bridge the gap between Wolfgang Petersen\u2019s Outbreak and Ivan Reitman\u2019s Evolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>That Cold Storage hews closer to comedy doesn\u2019t lessen the unnerving sensation of watching its horror unfold. Funny as the film is, the speed with which a biological agent can spread\u2014when the powers that be find the very notion laughable\u2014still makes one squirm in their seat. Ultimately, this is a story about a national dereliction of duty, and how easily authority brushes off genuine threats to that security as nonsense; the fungus is the monster, but military leadership (represented by Richard Brake, luxuriating in full asshole mode) is the villain. What a joy to see both toppled by an unassuming nice guy.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Director: Jonny Campbell<br \/>Writer: David Koepp<br \/>Starring: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Gavin Spokes, Aaron Heffernan, Elloria Torchia, Richard Brake, Sosie Bacon<br \/>Release Date: February 13, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even accounting for the time Joe Keery fed his rideshare passengers to slavering junkyard dogs, the actor\u2019s \u201caw&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-294286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}