My Summer Lair Chapter #350: Has Anything You’ve Put In Cold Storage Heated Up?
Just add some nasty green puke to that goofy-fun tone.
(And for the record? I can definitely do one more Happy Death Day movie—just putting that out into the universe.)
Joe Keery (from Stranger Things) plays Travis, aka Teacake, who is about to have his first eventful day at a boring job at a secluded cold storage facility. He hears an unknown yet repetitive beeping alarm.
Alongside his new co-worker Naomi (Georgina Campbell from Barbarian) their beeping noise investigation leads them to burst through a wall and—to quote Anchorman: “Well, that escalated quickly.”
Following the beeps leads them to a ladder leading deep underground to a former U.S. military base designed to keep the most deadly substances known to man locked away. Hence the tile: Cold Storage.
So, yes the beeping is bad… think of it as “bleeping” out the swears when you fully grasp that all of mankind is in danger. Eh, what’s the worst that can happen?
The movie is fiction, yet it’s rooted in real.
In Kansas, a refrigerated U.S. government facility from WWII was converted into a warehouse. And in 1979, the real Skylab did exactly what this movie describes: its orbit decayed, it re-entered the atmosphere and it crashed. Though, it’s not like it brought anything nasty back from space… right?
Cold Storage comes via a script from Jurassic Park (movie) writer David Koepp, who published Cold Storage as a novel in 2019. He’s now adapted his novel for this movie directed by Jonny Campbell and this MSL’s episode’s charming quest. (The novel and the movie are vastly different. If you dig Michael Crichton’s novel check out Koepp’s novel.)
Jonny described Cold Storage as “The Goonies for grown-ups.”
In this My Summer Lair episode:
- We unpack what “Goonies for grown-ups” means.
- We also trace the impressive way he balanced old-school practical effects with modern CGI to create infected “zombies”—for lack of a better horror word—that feel visceral and disgusting. (Picture The Thing with some subtle CGI.)
- And I had no choice… I had to talk to Jonny about Vincent and the Doctor. It’s a classic 2010 Doctor Who episode where the Doctor (Matt Smith!) helps Vincent van Gogh who is being menaced by an invisible monster.
Thank you Jonny for that wonderful Doctor Who episode.
But before we can talk about the raggedy man with a blue box we hafta talk about…The Goonies and Stand By Me and yes: Cold Storage.
Cold Storage @ W • T • F
Host Sammy Younan
Recorded: Wednesday, February 11, 2025 at 11:40 am (EST)
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