How do you follow starring in one of the biggest TV finales of the decade and scoring a huge UK number one song in quick succession? If you’re Joe Keery, it seems you lead a warmly-received new movie.
The Stranger Things favourite’s new big screen project Cold Storage is due in cinemas later this month, and has landed a pleasing response on Rotten Tomatoes.
It continues a real hot streak for the actor, whose music career under the alias Djo is also going from strength to strength, with his 2024 hit “End of Beginning” hitting the top of the UK singles charts last month.
Cold Storage also stars Georgina Campbell, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville, and is billed as a sci-fi horror comedy in which two young employees at a self-storage company built on the site of an old US military base have their work cut out when a parasitic fungus escapes.
At time of writing, its aggregated Rotten Tomatoes score is a very respectable 78%.
StudioCanal
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The AU Review called it “gross, goofy, and gleefully unhinged”, adding that it’s “exactly what it promises to be: a wild night at the movies where science goes wrong, people panic, and extinction has never looked this entertaining”.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To its credit, this is a movie that knows better than to take itself too seriously. It’s painless enough though could have been more than that with a thorough script polish.”
The San Francisco Chronicle was more critical, saying it “maintains a flimsy sort of interest, thanks to Neeson, who takes on the weight of this movie and deadlifts it to the level of mediocrity.”
Bloody Disgusting, meanwhile, reasoned: “This adaptation may not capture the energetic, humorous highs of its source material, but it’s still a fun horror romp suitable for date night this Valentine’s Day.”
Reiner Bajo//StudioCanal
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That source material, incidentally, is a 2019 novel of the same name by David Koepp, who also wrote the screenplay for the adaptation. Jonny Campbell directs.
“Cold Storage has everything I’d want to see in a movie – it’s scary, funny, exhilarating, surprising, and riotously entertaining,” Koepp said in an official statement.
Campbell described the project as “classic entertainment combining epic scale and microscopic detail”. He added that he was “instantly hijacked by David’s mischievously witty tone and his unique blend of comic absurdity and visionary reality”.
Cold Storage arrives in UK cinemas on 20 February.
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Shaun is an Evening News Editor at Digital Spy, with over a decade of experience reporting on all things pop culture. He has written for outlets including Metro, Attitude, Huffington Post, The Mirror, Yahoo!, Pink News and Express Online; specialising in TV, movies, soaps, music and LGBTQ+ issues. He is also a BAFTA Rocliffe-winning scriptwriter, having written episodes of the soap Hollyoaks, the official Steps musical Here & Now and multiple Offie Award-nominated plays. He studied English Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, and will happily talk at length about Desperate Housewives to anyone who’ll listen.