Producers: Simon Barrett, Andrew Swett, Alexander Black and Jeremy Platt Director: Adam Wingard Screenplay: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett Cast: Adria Arjona, Blake Kennedy, Reginald VelJohnson, Eric Wareheim, Dan Stevens, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey, Tyler Hall, Jasper Keen, Abby Townsend, Maurice Greene and Jacob Scipio Distributor: A24
Grade: D
Stylish trash is still trash; take Adam Wingard’s “Onslaught.” Essentially, it’s a home invasion movie with scifi overtones, some rote moralizing about official misconduct, a shot of sexual kinkiness just for fun and, most important, one of those kick-ass heroines who will go to any lengths to protect her child. The title refers to the assault of three super soldiers on a dusty New Mexico trailer park, but given the surfeit of noise and firepower (especially if endured in IMAX format), it can also describe the movie’s assault on the senses of its viewers.
The picture begins by introducing its two basic narrative tracks, whose collision becomes its centerpiece. One centers on Celeste (Adria Arjona), a veteran army sniper who suffers from PTSD following her horrifying combat experience. She’s in conflict with her ex-husband (Jacob Scipio), who’s threatening to take full custody of their little daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) even as he drops the girl off for a stay with her mother, who also manages Windy Oasis, the dreary trailer park where social misfits like hot-tempered Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), motorcyclist Arlo (Jasper Keen) and grizzled Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) have little lots. (Tom Hammock’s design of the place is persuasively dismal.)
By contrast Dr. Hans Kammler (Don Stevens) and his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall) live in luxury. They’re also a perverse couple, introduced when Hans, bald but for the long white hair down his neck and dressed entirely in white, abandons his breakfast to crawl across the kitchen floor and lick Hanna’s shoes. Then a car arrives to whisk him to the secret laboratory where he’s continuing what are apparently Nazi-era experiments to turn dead soldiers into implacable creatures fit to put down not just foreign foes but any sort of domestic disorder.
But Stevens and Michael Biehn, as a sort of lab overseer named Baylor, play what are actually just extended cameos, because both are gorily killed, along with all the workers, when the experiment goes awry and the three super-soldiers—called The Butcher (Alex Pereira), Cockroach (Dave Campell) and Crybaby (Tyler Hall)–stride out of the destroyed compound to look for people to suppress.
They proceed to a truck stop where they blow away all the staff and customers, including poor Arlo, who just stopped by for a drink, and chirpy waitress Lily (Abby Townsend). Then they take a semi cab to the trailer park, which they assault without warning, killing off many of the renters in unusual ways, splattering one’s blood across the laundry he’s pinned up to dry and another as he’s grilling burgers, turning his body into a human bonfire. Celeste reverts to battle mode, joined in time by Josiah and Kovacks, her chief purpose, of course, being to save Daisy, who turns into a little scream machine.
Meanwhile a government fixer named Cyrus (Drew Starkey), who’s introduced in a drug-induced haze watching a buxom exotic dancer performing in what appears to be an expensive house of ill repute, is summoned to clean up the mess. He arrives first at the truck stop, where he slips on the blood-soaked floors while executing the sole survivor, before speeding with his team to the trailer park.
By the time he arrives, Celeste has done her work despite the anxiety she suffers in targeting her rifle. In a pinch she’ll resort to other weapons, like a chainsaw that she takes to one attacker’s leg before having at the rest of him with it. The last super-soldier standing is The Butcher, and wouldn’t you know it, he’s the very brutish comrade who once challenged Celeste to a hand-to-hand fight, which she quickly settled with a kick to his testicles (har, har). He remembers that indignity, and comes after he with ferocity, but of course in the end her grizzly mom’s tenacity wins out.
Arjona and her stand-ins aren’t exactly convincing, petite as they are, as a woman who can’t be stopped by assault rifle or knife, but she certainly puts on a determined scowl. (Actually, Celeste doesn’t seem all that great a mother, her main contribution to Daisy’s education being to teach the kid how to eat a burrito as sloppily as possible.) VelJohnson and Wareheim chew up the scenery as her comrades-in-arms, but not to the extent of Stevens and Hall, who camp it up outrageously as the Kammlers, or Starkey, who flits about like a preening butterfly as oh-so-delicate Cyrus.
Pereira, Starkey and Hall are formidably beefy presences as the masked murderous soldiers in their black outfits, but only Pereira gets any real screen time, and that in periodic flashbacks to his former fight with Celeste. Wingard and cinematographer Oren Soffer make a point of emphasizing how terrifying the trio is with periodic shots of them standing motionless in a line, weapons at the ready, before initiating their rampages; an especially nice touch is the bright gleam in their eyes. Otherwise, the action scenes are staged well enough, though the night darkness often leaves them murky and the editing by Josh Schaeffer and Adam Avery adds to the messiness. Indeed, their best contribution comes in the opening credits sequence, a quite brilliantly executed montage using graphics and newsreel clips to depict the government’s use of secretive military options in reverse chronological order, from the present all the way back to World War II. Throughout the score by Matthew Pusti pummels us as brutally as the super-soldiers do their victims.
“This is all very unfortunate,” Mrs. Kammler says after observing the devastation wrought by her husband’s creations at the end of the movie. It’s a sentiment a viewer can share about the movie itself, which might be thought of as a revisiting of Wingard’s 2011 slasher flick “You’re Next” on a larger canvas. A pity it doesn’t follow the lead of his far superior film, the clever “The Guest” (2014)—also about a super-soldier and also with Stevens—instead.