By Dan Skip Allen

My first experience with an Adam Wingard movie was a promo screening of “You’re Next” in 2011. I went with my buddy Vinnie LaSpada. It was a typical horror movie that I wasn’t much a fan of at the time. Wingard’s films have intrigued me ever since. Especially his breakout hit “The Guest” in 2014. Ever since he’s done a couple of Godzilla films and a remake of “The Blair With Project” under the guise of The Woods at San Diego Comicon a clever marketing campaign didn’t do the film much good. He’s mainly a horror director, and his latest movie “Onslaught” is another horror movie. It’s just not as good as I’d hoped it was. 

Celeste (Adria Atjona) is an ex-Army sniper who is a bit jaded about society. She runs a mobile home park called Windy Oasis in the middle of a desert on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She suffers from PTSD due to an incident when she was in the war in Iraq some years before. When an elite quad of indestructible super soldiers who were genetically engineered for one purpose, human annihilation escapes their secret prison in the desert they just happen to come across this small mobile home community. Arjona’s character must defend her young daughter and herself against these bloodthirsty brainless maniacs set on human destruction by any means. Little do they know, they don’t know who they’re messing with.

There is a decent supporting cast in this film as well as the main character. Dan Stevens, a frequent collaborator of Wingard’s, plays a German doctor who is running the experiment on deceased soldiers trying to create these super soldiers. He has a weird look about him and comes across as a bit cooky. This is par for the course for Stevens, who has played some odd characters in his career. Another weirdo, Cyrus, is played by Drew Starkey (Lucky). He is a cleaner who goes behind the killers and cleans up their bloody destruction and kills witnesses of said destruction. Rebecca Hall plays the wife of Steven’s character, and she may be pulling the strings on the whole thing. She’s another eccentric character in a film full of them. And last but not least, Reginald VelJohnson plays Josiah, an ex-vietnam vet who lives in the mobile home park Arjona’s character manages. He’s a friend of hers and helps her try to fend off these bloodthirsty super soldiers. This cast is pretty good. I just wish the movie was as good as the work this cast is doing.

With any horror movie, there are going to be some crazy kills, and this one has plenty of those to go around. The super soldiers are running rampant through the facility they were originally in and eventually start going places like a truck stop to kill people indiscriminately without remorse. They use axes, chainsaws, and the high-powered weapons to mow down civilians left and right. When they miss somebody, they come back with even more destruction. Once they get to the mobile home park, they break through walls, crawl under homes, and smash windows to kill innocents in their mobile homes. It’s an absolute bloodbath, but then the Arjona character has to protect her family and friends, and she creates her own kills with crazy violence and around. There is plenty of blood and guts to go around in this movie. 

One problem I had with the film, and it’s a big one, is there is a huge contrivance in the story. There is a plot device involving flashbacks that are done in black and white with the Arjona character in Iraq during the Gulf War. The screenplay connects her character to the events going on in the present, and I think that’s a bit too much. This story would have been perfectly fine as a psycho killer squad running around killing people indescribably without remorse for no real reason whatsoever. It didn’t have to have a tie-in to the main character just for the sake of it. That’s a major script issue that I just can’t get past.

One thing I did love about the film was its score and music. It felt like the score had a lot of techno sounds in it. This is a signature of Wingard’s films. He loves to infuse his movies with techno music and a high-energy soundtrack. Matt Pusti, aka “Makeup and Vanity Set” was the composer of the music, and he made an indelible score as far as I’m concerned. There was a hint of the “Halloween” score from John Carpenter as well. His synthetic and guitar work here is something I’ll always remember about this movie. I love a memorable score in the films I watch. This one definitely has that going for it.

“Onslaught” was a film I knew little about going in, and that was a good thing because it made me anticipate it more. After I finally saw it, I was less enthralled with what I saw. There was an interesting premise here that started off promising but eventually became hinged on a contrivance I couldn’t get past. Stevens and Hall are hamming it up as characters with German accents, and Arjona is doing the best she can given the script she has to work with. The bloody violence and kills were entertaining for a little while, but I got sick of this premise by the third act. It’s a shame because I was all in on this film for the first two acts. Wingard is a good filmmaker. I think he was let down by a subpar script that failed in the end. I definitely will look forward to his next movie though.

🌟 🌟 ½ stars