Solemplex
To me, this movie is perfection.
Matialth
Good concept, poorly executed.
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Deanna
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
loomis78-815-989034
Melissa (Leet) discovers her boyfriend Daric (Keeslar) cheated on her so she joins a play in a small Tennessee town to get away. On the way there she has a brutal car accident and is found on the side of the road by Clive (Searcy). Clive is a mentally challenged man who lives in a shack by himself in the woods. Seeing Melissa as a gift from God for his extreme loneliness, Clive takes her up to the shack and begins a relationship with her, mostly in his mind. Melissa's sister Cathy (Carter) takes a guilt ridden Daric with her to the town to discover what happened to her sister. Director Tony Elwood working from a script by himself and Mark Kimray steers Cold Storage in several different directions. It's hard at first to tell if Melissa is seriously injured from the crash of out right dead. Soon you realize she is dead and Clive is moving around a corpse which is creepy in itself. Clive is so delusional and his loneliness so fierce, he is just thrilled to have another body with him. This is when this movie is at its best. Elwood makes Clive sympathetic even though his outward appearance his gross and you actually feel his loneliness. As mentioned, Elwood takes the story down different paths including dark and intentional humor which doesn't always work. There is a lecherous neighbor named Luther Spoole (Brett Gentile) that is stupid and unwanted. The movie never really picks up momentum. It just runs along until the end confrontation with Clive and the sister and boyfriend. There isn't much horror or suspense in the film until the very end when Cathy is captured briefly. Credit must be given to Tony Elwood for resisting the urge to turn this into low grade torture porn. Nick Searcy is strong and believable in the lead role of Clive. Unfortunately 'Cold Storage' doesn't move the meter in the horror department and may have worked better as a twisted drama.
piratecannon
Have you ever seen Weekend at Bernie's? How about Deliverance? Maybe even Wrong Turn? Tony Elwood's Cold Storage is mishmash of all of these films—a "movie medley," of sorts. One would think that, given the sheer entertainment value possible when movies such as these are combined (shlock though they are), the final product would be nothing short of a delightful little tale of mountainside gore and inbred shenanigans. That, however, is not the case.Cold Storage is about an aspiring actress named Melissa who leaves her Charlotte area residence (woot!) to take on a gig in a rural (and I mean rural) Tennessee mountain town. On the way there, a bird crashes into her windshield and she somehow manages to fly out of her car and land on her head. Never mind the fact that the whole plot hinges on stray fowl: how did her car door open (without the automobile flipping over) and how did she manage to hit the blacktop in a "jackhammer" position? I know it's supposed to be over-the-top, but defying the laws of physics is an entirely different matter.So, here's our starry-eyed actress, lying prostrate and paralyzed in the middle of a Tennessee back road. The next person to come along, of course, is a fella named Clive. He's a local who has delusions of courting a long-departed nurse who was kind to him in his youth. He scoops up Melissa and carries her home, and eventually his fractured mind assigns her the identity of the aforementioned love of his life. The problem with all this is that Melissa soon dies due to her injuries, and Clive seems to take no notice. He even parades her rotting corpse around town in his rusted out clunker.This does make for some humorous moments, but the extreme nature of some of the funnier bits—such as when Clive "brushes his teeth" with a straight razor and pops a tick the size of a quarter with his bare hands —are oddly counterbalanced by what were supposed to have been moments of poignant reflection on the part of our anti-hero. These moments are so strangely juxtaposed that it makes the movie feel as if it's constantly teetering on the edge of oblivion. It just can't seem to make a clear statement about what sort of story it'd like to be, and viewers are left wondering if it's okay to laugh at scenes that could be taken as comical or pseudo-serious.To add to the woes, the whole production is hampered by atrocious acting from the very beginning. Even though this is a goofy horror/thriller at heart, the characters still need to be at least moderately believable—as is the case with any piece of effective storytelling—to elicit some degree of concern from viewers. With Cold Storage, we're given something akin to a late night round of charades that's punctuated by badly delivered (and badly written) dialogue. At times, wincingly so.There's also the stock characters of the incompetent Sheriff and the wizened local, both of whom are—strangely enough—friends (and both of whom advise Melissa's sister and ex-boyfriend to take different courses of action to try and locate said missing person).Even though it's got a few humorous moments, Cold Storage is a mess. If you're looking for goofy laughs and horror films of the hillbilly variety, check out Wrong Turn. At least then you'll know that it's all very much tongue-in-cheek.
charlytully
This movie is less about being a horror splatter-fest, and more along the lines of "How to become a zombie bride." (In fact, the one person viewers KNOW is "really quite sincerely dead" by the end is the victim of the opening, Hedwig-induced car crash.) Otherwise, writer\director Tony Elwood provides a level of horror genre restraint almost on par with thriller classics from yesteryear, say Hitchcock's PSYCHO. Nick Searcy, as necromancing groom Clive Mercer, shows that he's ready to step into the Anthony Perkins role (hotelier Norman Bates) when the next PSYCHO remake is made. Particularly intriguing are Clive's dental hygiene habits. Brett Gentile nearly matches Searcy in his portrayal of Clive's nemesis, the even coarser Luther Spoole. While Jeffrey Pillars' caricature of a Southern sheriff is strictly by the book of Hollywood stereotypes, and Matt Keeslar joins Joelle Carter in being fairly bland as the clueless outsiders on the search for a missing loved one in the back country, bit players such as John W. Love, Jr. (Jerome), Rebecca Koon (Jewell), and Gina Stewart (Rhonda) shine in their parts with a light that often eludes even the leads in low-budget, little-seen horror flicks such as COLD STORAGE. Perhaps the producers' most questionable decision is to use Matthew Stewart's lament "Take Me" as the closing credits song, with lyrics such as "I'm prepared to prostitute my name; all I ask is 15 minutes' fame." Most of the people connected to this movie seemed to have a very opposite attitude; this is NOT Paris Hilton's HOUSE OF WAX remake (though it probably cost 100 times less).
movieman_kev
Clive, a deranged back-woods type, finds whom he believes to be the girl of his dreams. There's one little snag. She's dead from a car accident. So naturally he won't let this little thing put a damper on their happiness together and he'll do anything to make his budding love last. But here comes the deceased girl's sister, leave it to a broad to ruin true love.This film was boring and a chore to sit through for the most part. It was reasonably well-acted, but 1974's "Deranged" was a much better similar film. Nothing to go out of your way to watch, but luckily it's on Instant Netflix so I didn't.