Adam Wingard loves John Carpenter so much that his horror thriller Onslaught plays like J.C.’s greatest hits. Celeste (Adria Arjona) is an ex-military sniper who manages a remote trailer park, preferring to stay isolated as a result of PTSD from what she’s seen in combat. Her young daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy) is dropped off unexpectedly for a weekend with Mom when her father is called away on business. Meanwhile at a secret government facility a few miles away, Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) is completing his project to create a super-soldier using military inmates who snapped and became murderers.
Kammler has “upgraded” the subjects to make them even more remorseless and effective killing machines. “It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity! Or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop!” Sound familiar? That’s Kyle Reese describing a terminator in that 1984 film. A government agent named Baylor (Michael Biehn, who also played Kyle Reese in the aforementioned film) arrives to review Kammler’s work and insists on a demonstration. The programmed soldiers are uncontrollable, killing not only Baylor’s men, but everyone else, including Kammler. Then they move on to a convenience store, and after that to Celeste’s trailer park.
The government activates a cleaner named Cyrus (Drew Starkey) to sort out the mess, but at the behest of Kammler’s widow, Hanna (a cameo from Rebecca Hall), they decide to use the trailer park to test the effectiveness of their killers against the general public. Cue the body count. The plot is so thin it’s practically incidental.
” … Kammler has ‘upgraded’ the subjects, turning them into remorseless killing machines …”
Carpenter is a beloved filmmaker of horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s. His Assault on Precinct 13, and Escape from New York are classics. For horror, nothing outside The Exorcist has achieved the deep, sickening terror of Halloween, The Prince of Darkness or The Fog. His synth driven soundtracks, mostly composed and performed by Carpenter himself, are less about artistic genius than they are works of necessity, but they have a purity and authenticity that strikes deep into the heart of the fans (and they also show artistic genius.) Carpenter is so good, and so ubiquitous that anything in that space now feels like a copy of his style, at least to some degree. So Wingard said “F**k it” and went all in for an homage to Carpenter, with a little of The Terminator thrown in, and it’s good, but it’s not great.
Nostalgically, everything is here. We have an arch-villain mad scientist who speaks in a ridiculous, exaggerated German accent, played by Dan Stevens in a bizarre bald cap wig. All he is missing to be a Bond villain is a white cat. Arjona patches an injured eye early on and looks a lot like Snake Plisskin from Escape from New York. The nameless, faceless killers are patchwork monsters made up of The Terminator, The Predator, The Universal Soldier, Michael Myers, and Robocop. Arjona and Kennedy as mother and daughter have charming chemistry, with clever quips from Kennedy. Reginald VelJohnson slips comfortably into the archetype “sympathetic Black man” supporting character that he invented in Die Hard.
Honorable mention goes to the not-so-subtle metaphor of ICE-like violence against mainly brown people in the trailer park. Wingard slips that blade between your ribs while you’re hiding from the boogie men. Even the officials overseeing the operation have no compassion, and no regard for human life.
"…an adept pastiche of potent nostalgic elements. "
