Cold Storage (2026) opens with an intertitle explaining the fate of the Skylab space station. The film informs us that Skylab crashed back to Earth, most of it burning up during reentry. However, one crucial piece survives: an oxygen tank that somehow ends up in a forgotten Australian backwater.
This raises an immediate question. A large piece of a famous space station survives intact, becomes a local tourist attraction, and even attracts media attention (we even see newspaper clippings), yet NASA remains completely unaware of its existence until people begin dying in high numbers and gruesome manners? That seems less like a plot point and more like a failure of basic information gathering.
The authorities eventually (i.e., decades later) respond by dispatching exactly three people to investigate, among them the unfortunately named Dr. Hero Martins. Hero promptly becomes infected by a mind-controlling fungus. At that point it becomes difficult to decide what is most implausible: the fungus’ instantaneous incubation period, its ability to penetrate the thick sole of a boot, or its capacity to communicate with its host in fluent English (ordering her to “spread”).
After this prologue, the film jumps to the present day and introduces its protagonists. The hero, Teacake, is first seen reading The Body Snatchers. The heroine is immediately established as clever enough to recognize that “Teacake” is a literary reference and, more importantly, aware that Teacake is an ex-convict whose employment is a condition of his parole. Counterintuitively, she pressures him into vandalizing the facility they are supposed to be guarding.
The choice to show Teacake reading The Body Snatchers is curious. Were the filmmakers worried audiences might not understand from the opening sequence that they were watching a body-snatcher story? Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. To be fair, viewers may have forgotten the fungus by this point because it takes remarkably long for anything fungus-related to happen. When it finally does, the results are underwhelming. The fungus either transforms animals into flat, weightless CGI approximations of themselves or causes infected humans to hallucinate things that are obviously digital effects added long after principal photography ended.
Speaking of animals, one of the film’s more intriguing ideas arrives when the protagonists discover a rat king. The heroine explains that the concept dates back to the Middle Ages and is closely associated with plague outbreaks. Assuming that’s factual, it's actually a stronger thematic connection than the Body Snatchers reference. The “Teacake” allusion is even more esoteric, but for those who know, it foreshadows tragic events that run counter to the film’s mostly happy ending.
Anyway, the long mid-stretch is devoted to both leads exhibiting far more resistance to infection than Dr. Hero despite wandering around without hazmat suits (I can only conclude that they buy superior footwear) and to what may be generously termed as character development. Neither protagonist is especially compelling. Near the end, the heroine tells Teacake that he is “more interesting than he looks,” or words to that effect. Simply announcing that a character is interesting does not make him so. Conversely, featuring a Stranger Things actor in yet another Stranger Things knockoff does make him typecast.
At long last, the story arrives at its inevitable climax involving a nuclear device complete with that mainstay of clunky exposition — our old pal the Red Digital Readout, still going strong a quarter into the 21st century. We are assured that the detonation will “irradiate the place” while somehow producing “no atmospheric fallout.” Whether this paradoxical statement has any scientific basis is debatable. In any case, the resulting CGI explosion looks so harmless that it scarcely seems worth worrying about.
The film concludes with a deer vomiting directly toward the camera, a final image intended to tease an inevitable sequel but that only serves as a reminder that the preceding ninety minutes were largely a waste thereof.
Cold Storage wants to be a quirky creature feature, a body-snatcher thriller, and a nostalgic sci-fi horror B comedy that mostly succeeds in being a collection of familiar ideas stitched together with questionable logic, underwhelming visual effects, and characters who never become as interesting as the screenplay insists they are.
Official trailer 
