Cold Storage (2026) begins by establishing the fate of Skylab through an opening title card, explaining it crashed back to Earth, though most of it burned up during reentry. A critical component—an oxygen tank—surprisingly survived and ended up in a remote Australian location. This immediately brings up a question. How could a significant piece of a well-known space station remain intact, become a local attraction, even garner media coverage (newspaper clippings are shown), while NASA remained completely unaware of its existence until people started dying in alarming numbers and gruesome ways? It feels less like an element of the plot and more like a failure to gather basic information. Eventually, authorities respond—decades later—by sending just three individuals to investigate, including the oddly named Dr. Hero Martins. She quickly becomes infected with a mind-controlling fungus. At that point, it’s hard to determine what's most unbelievable: the fungus’s rapid incubation period, its ability to penetrate a thick boot sole, or its capacity to communicate with its host in fluent English (instructing her to “spread”). Following this introductory sequence, the film shifts to the present day and introduces the main characters. The hero, Teacake, is first seen reading *The Body Snatchers*. The heroine is immediately presented as intelligent enough to recognize that "Teacake" is a literary reference and, more importantly, aware that he’s an ex-convict whose employment is tied to his parole conditions. Surprisingly, she encourages him to vandalize the facility they are tasked with guarding. The decision to show Teacake reading *The Body Snatchers* seems odd. Were the filmmakers concerned audiences wouldn't realize from the beginning that it’s a body-snatcher story? It's an unnecessary display of confidence. To be fair, viewers might have forgotten about the fungus by this point because there’s a considerable wait before anything related to it actually happens. When it finally does occur, the results are disappointing. The fungus either transforms animals into flat, weightless CGI versions of themselves or causes infected humans to hallucinate things that are obviously digital effects added long after filming wrapped. Regarding the animals, one of the film’s more intriguing concepts is introduced when the protagonists discover a rat king. The heroine explains that this concept dates back to the Middle Ages and is closely linked 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 obscure, but for those familiar with it, it foreshadows tragic events that contrast with the film’s largely upbeat ending. The lengthy middle section focuses on both leads demonstrating greater resistance to infection than Dr. Hero—despite wandering around without protective suits (one can only assume they have superior footwear)—and what might generously be called character development. Neither protagonist proves particularly engaging. Near the end, the heroine tells Teacake that he is “more interesting than he looks,” or something similar. Simply stating a character is interesting doesn’t make them so. Conversely, casting an actor previously known from *Stranger Things* in another story resembling it only reinforces typecasting. Finally, the narrative reaches its predictable climax involving a nuclear device complete with the familiar clunky exposition tool—the Red Digital Readout, still going strong into the 21st century. We’re told that the detonation will “irradiate the place” while somehow producing “no atmospheric fallout.” Whether this contradictory statement has any scientific basis is open to debate. In any case, the resulting CGI explosion looks so harmless 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 simply serves as a reminder of how the preceding ninety minutes were mostly wasted. Cold Storage aims to be a quirky creature feature, a body-snatcher thriller, and a nostalgic sci-fi horror B comedy, ultimately succeeding mainly in being a collection of familiar ideas held together with questionable logic, underwhelming visual effects, and characters who never quite live up to the screenplay’s insistence that they are compelling.

Source on TMDB