“The f—ing deer just took the f—ing elevator.”

ZombieDog’s rating: Three zombie deer

ZombieDog’s review: If cult movies are that friend who is just a little bit weird, has tons of inside jokes, and totally gets you, then drive-in movies are your exponentially more extroverted friend who wants nothing more than stand large crowd. Born in the ’50s and filled with monsters and mayhem, the drive-in movie itself was practically a symbol of independence and freedom.

Having lived through at least part of the driving age, I can tell you that they were… okay. Not great but okay. Sometimes they were awesome. I realize it’s a bit of a contradiction, but bear with me for a second. The drive-in movie was an event. It basically started with gathering as many people as you can possibly find, shoving some of them in the trunk, picking the best place to do some smoking and drinking, and sitting back to watch a movie a you could barely hear. It was usually a double feature, and the first movie you would only get to see about half of it because the sun wasn’t down yet. Nobody messed with you unless you got out of hand, at which point they would kick you out.

For the most part though, it was basically a mobile party with about 300 other people. This was never really about the movie; it was about a collective experience around film.

As the movie theater is slowly dying, collective experiences become few and far between. The really bad thing is though, I think they are amazingly fun and I am thoroughly confused why people haven’t noticed the conspicuous absence of enjoying movies together.

Cold Storage is without a doubt a drive-in movie meant to be watched in a group of people who are off-kilter for whatever reason. The movie stars Liam Neeson as Robert Quinn, a grizzled veteran who has spent his military career dealing with nuclear, biological, and chemical threats (NBC). We see him at the beginning of his career coming across a small town whose people have been infected with a bacteria and started behaving in very unusual ways — zombies, pretty much. Quinn and his team managed to stop the infection from spreading further, although not before they lose one of their own.

Flash-forward 30 years, and we find Tea Cake (Joe Keery) who is working at an abandoned military facility which has been converted into self-storage units. His boss, Griffin (Gavin Spokes) is exactly that asshole boss you don’t want to have, encouraging him to commit crimes.

This is the point when I feel I have to tell you that this movie is almost exactly a beat-for-beat remake of Return of the Living Dead — arguably one of the greatest zombie movies ever. Okay, to be fair, it’s not an exact remake. The setting is changed, the characters had different jobs, and the zombies in this movie are aggressive zombie deer. But the director of this film has absolutely seen Return of the Living Dead.

On the night Tea Cake has to train up someone new, Griffin tells Tea Cake and the new girl that he hears a beeping noise in the building and for them to find it and fix it. I have to admit this part is kinda cool. They start tearing apart walls to find military equipment still running. They keep exploring further and find ladders to secret parts of the facility that were previously unknown. One of these parts is a secret laboratory where the bacteria from the town in the first part of the movie has escaped.

The act of them tearing apart the facility sets off alarms in a military monitoring station, triggering a call to the now-retired Quinn. Quinn, bothered by their lack of motivation to tackle this problem seriously, decides to take it upon himself. He calls his old partner and asks her to bring the nuclear bomb that they stored together in her garage. And so what we have is a nuclear bomb about the size of a suitcase now being hurried towards the self-storage facility.

This is a comedy and a legitimate zombie horror film with some dark aspects. Cold Storage is pretty clearly meant to take the viewer on a crazy roller coaster zombie ride.

So, is this movie any good? Oh no. No, it’s horrible. That is… unless you watch it with a bunch of people where you can laugh at the obvious stolen storyline, lovable hero, creepy yet original zombies, and inept criminals. Then yeah, this movie is awesome. I think as the theater is dying and almost all media experiences are turning into subjective events, so we need to preserve the joys of simply watching movies with friends.