Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Cold Storage (2026)

Welcome back, midnight viewers to Father Malone's weekly round up. I am Father Malone and with me as always the Bucky to my cap. She's with me to the end of the line, Miss Ripley. Gee, oh really fine, take the shield bye. How have you all been?

It's been a minute. We've been kind of swamped here lately in the Lighthouse doing what well, I'll tell you. Over on the Patreon channel, we've got a brand new series up and running. That's a Vault seven two, The Fallout Podcast, where my co host Nukakota Quantum and I discussed the Fallout universe and more specifically the Amazon television series. Next week, HP is joining me on the Patreon for our new series step Off, where we discussed the early two thousands gone before its time bit of pop culture genius that was The White Wrapper Show.

Meanwhile, in the regular feed, Mike and I will be finishing up our appraisal of the Hammer House of Horror in just a few weeks, and after that, we've already taken up residence with mister Roald Dol and his extensive anthology series Tales of the Unexpected. And if I haven't made it clear yet, HP and I are currently engaged in Von Dumfest, where we are doing individualized episodes about the major MCU characters as we count down to Avengers Doomsday. We got a bit of viewer mail here, not pen pals from around the world, necessarily just a comment, but Jason Jeffers wrote in to say Ripley Gene is a much better sidekick than Bucky. He's talking about the series of videos I've been putting out on my Instagram and Patreon page featuring me in a full Captain America costume doing things like tai chi or taking Ripley for a walk.

It's all very silly and all very fun, and links are in the show notes if you want to see for yourself. And yes, Jason, I totally agree Ripley is the best sidekick of all time, except when trouble arises and she huffs and then runs behind me, and sure when I ignite the midnight viewing symbol in the night sky, she usually sleeps through it, leaving me to deal with that evening's villainy. And on occasion she may have actually helped those villains because they offered her a piece of sweet Italian sausage. But you're right, Jason, She's the best. All right.

This week's roundup is going to be a bit shorter than usual, but I hope you won't hold that against me. I have been busy this past week moving stuff around in a storage facility. Speaking of two low level workers in a storage facility that holds a decades old virus which, once unleashed, transforms all into mindless zombies. Then to combat this, they contact the army, whose solution is a nuclear device. I love to Return of the Living Dead, but we're talking about cold storage.

I don't hear anything. Well, I definitely heard it. Well, not definitely, I mean I was like aware of it, you know what I mean, Like I was having an argument with my brain about it. You are very chatty, pass. This place was a military storage back in the day.

No, I'm good. We're getting a temperature breach alert from a decommissioned facility. Some of us have encountered this before. We created a new species. Jesus Christ, I gotta get out of here.

This thing spreading. Are you kidding me? That's fungus? Is mutation scrap? That fucking DearS, Just start the fucking over there.

You too, may have started the night minimum wage guards. But you're a green light team. Now, that is a nuke. What are you nuts? No, I'm ambitious.

That's not natural. Storage facilities are inherently creepy. Like I said, the past four or five days leading up to me watching Cold Storage, I spent well within a three story labyrinthine storage facility, moving contents from a locker in one wing on one floor down to another wing on another floor. Mercifully, I had an organizational genius with me because I couldn't walk twenty feet in that place without getting lost. And once lost in that liminal space, row after row of corrugated metal, same hallway, same connector, same stairwell, it is such a fucking natural environment for horror movies.

It's kind of crazy. We haven't gotten a definitive take on it. There have been attempts Storage twenty three bloodshed. Even Guermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities made a stab and they all failed, And that's kind of what we have here with Cold Storage. Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell are the hapless workers at the storage facility, which in a previous life had been a high security military facility, naturally.

The film takes place over one night when curiosity about where that beeping is coming from gets the better of them, and soon they're knocking down walls and unlocking vault doors. You know what, here's the thing. This is a B movie and that's all it's trying to be. So it makes itself kind of bulletproof. If you like it, you're a good sport.

If you don't, why do you hate fun? I don't hate fun, and I can appreciate a no budget film from five decades ago that did its best while having dozens of limitations to its greatness. However, a multimillion dollar budgeted film made with all the latest and digital practical effects with Liam Neeson anchoring it isn't exactly the latest offering from Roger Korman. So no, this isn't to turn your brain off and enjoy yourself situation. And it's all because of the prologue.

The first fifteen minutes of this ninety minute flick are spent in Australia, where we get an overly complicated backstory about an oxygen tank from star Lab, the famous piece of space junk that fell out of orbit and crashed into the Indian ocean in nineteen seventy nine. That tank contained an experimental mutating fungus. The film starts eighteen years after that event, when the tank is preached and an entire town is wiped out, the residents becoming hosts for creatures with only one directive spread the infection, which is usually accomplished by getting somewhere high up and letting the infection burst out of their body and take to the air like a fucking evil dandelion or more evil dandelion.

Liam Mason and Leslie Manville show up with an epidemiologist to assess the scene in its frightening and disgusting and sets a tone of seriousness that the film will spend the next seventy five minutes trying desperately to buck off as if it were a burden, which ends up undoing any fun to be had because we immediately jump to one of a half dozen or so caffeinated montage sequences showing the passage of time. The Cockroad's journey is particularly well done, and then we're in the present with hapless loser Joe Keery and his self motivation tapes and new Higher Campbell, who, if not the definition of a Mary Sue. I don't know what is. She had some schooling to become a veterinarian, so anytime there's the barest hint of a scientific question, she will tell you exactly what's going on.

Add in a suicidal widow, a biker gang, and the return of the spores. Now with a rat king, a really disgusting rat king. It all feels outsized, like it's a condensed version of a much larger global story, almost as if it's based on a book, and it is. Cold Storage was published in twenty nineteen, one year before we realize exactly what a pandemic would actually look like globally, So the screenwriter must have dropped the ball, giving us such a wildly fluctuating tone and the kind of youthful dialogue that used to dominate John Hughes movies. Right, Except the screenwriter is the book's author, so maybe he's just not used to the form.

See how much allowance I'm giving. The writer of both the book and the screenplay is David Kepp. He wrote Death Becomes Her and Jurassic Park, and in the intervening years, has contributed to Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, and the latter to Indiana Jones Movies, the guy is talented. I think I've never made up my mind about him, because when it's a collaboration or an adaptation, the movie is fucking aces And when left to his own devices, it's the trigger effect and secret window. And he should have known better.

Here. The Return of the Living Dead comparison once it hit hit fucking hard, not only in plot, in theme, but in comparison, but in comparison of what a bottle b movie ought to be. We didn't need to go to the VA Hospital in Pittsburgh in nineteen sixty seven at the beginning of that film to sense the enormity of what's about to happen. Nor did we leave that dead end street once we got there. This film continues globe hopping as it's running out its run time.

We're in West Virginia, we're in the air with Liam Neeson. We're at a command center in Washington and dealing with a rogue agent supplying Nis in his needed intel. Ninety minutes isn't a huge amount of time for character development, But like screenwriting one oh one, everyone gets their arc. Everyone has the moment of triumph. Not that we know or care about any of them.

Actually, that's not true. Nissan and Manville have such an easy chemistry and genuine gravitas that every time they're together, the movie positively comes to life. You start missing them almost immediately, because whenever we're back with Kiri and Campbell, it's all watching them fumble through situations where we know what's happening and they don't, and that's frustrating, not tension filled. My usual go to would be to point out some other positives of the film, but my mind is just filled with cgidear and cgikats and CGI everything. It all feels and looks so unreal unless it's a practical effect, in which case it looks great.

So maybe I'm praising the practical effects. Campbell's ex boyfriend shows up and is immediately infected and basically swells and mutates over the course of the film, and that makeup is amazing. Oh that's another thing. Rules are the most important thing in horror. We're given a virus that wants only one spread, much like John Carpent just the thing.

It just wants to infect everything. So when we start in Australia and our epidemiologist becomes infected, she immediately has the drive to get in a car and drive to a populated area. But for the rest of the film, the infected behave how the scene needs. So a regular human can still be hanging out with a biker gang full of zombies and they don't immediately swarm him. Stepping back from David Kep for a second, I think that need to have characters act dramatically or otherwise after they've behaved in aggressive, mindless ways is the hallmark of an action filmmaker doing a horror movie, and they probably did the movie because it did be a hoot.

The same phenomenon was present in that fucking horrible Dawn of the Dead remake. In retrospect, I'm shocked to Zack Snyder didn't have all the zombies super ripped and posing all around that parking lot. I guess he was saving that for Army of the Dead. Cold storage is a fine enough diversion. But let's leave the camp to the campy and the horror to the horror makers, and let's wait till someone comes along who is genuinely interested in the hybridizing that you can do both Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and John Landis cracked the code.

Even Dan O'Bannon, who was a writer for hire, managed to turn The Return of the Living Dead into a film equal parts hilarious and horrifying. For me, if I want to experience real horror in a storage facility, I'll just go back to the one I was toiling at the past four days and simply try to find the restroom. I'm just that clueless. And that's the sum total of the roundup this week. I'm sorry it's been sporadic, dear listeners, but Father Malone has been for the past couple of weeks engaged in a bit of self help and therapy and grief counseling and all the things I've been putting off for more than five years now, so it's a little harder to concentrate on the minutia of the latest Super Mario movie or whatever the fuck I've been staring at while pondering this time bomb in my mind.

I'm working through a lot of bullshit that made me behave over the years in ways I am positively ashamed of. I'm doing my best to make amends to everyone affected. This show has been my rock in all of this and you, dear listeners, have been an absolute gift. So so I'm doing my best to keep doing my best, so you're entertained and I can feel a bit of peace for Ripley Gean, I'm Father Malone. Until next time, Gang, try to enjoy the daylight.