Cold Storage's secret weapon is writer David Koepp

Cold Storage could have been easy to miss over the holiday weekend. The semi-wide release shared screens with other films, and some markets, like Manhattan, mostly offered evening showings. Its trailers also made the movie look like just another low-rent horror comedy, but the finished film proves more substantial than the marketing suggests.

David Koepp, adapting his first novel from 2019, is the chief reason. He tightens the premise — overnight worker Travis (Stranger Things' Joe Keery) and new coworker Naomi (Barbarian star Georgia Campbell) investigate a beeping alarm at a rural storage facility and uncover secret tunnels leading to a government vault containing a mutated fungus.

That pathogen, shown in a prologue, spreads quickly and gruesomely, turning hosts into ravaged, exploding fungal messes in a way that recalls the outbreak in 28 Days Later, and the breach summons government operative Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson), who encountered the fungus two decades earlier.

cold storage, david koepp, joe keery, georgia campbell, liam neeson, mutated fungus, storage facility, government vault, fungal outbreak, robert quinn