‘Onslaught’ Is a Quick, Dirty, and Fun John Carpenter Homage

In 2014, director Adam Wingard made an overt homage to the 1980s oeuvre of legendary director John Capenter with The Guest, a gnarly, synth-heavy genre piece about a military veteran who isn’t as wholesome as he appears to be. With Onslaught, Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have taken The Guest and mashed it together with their 2011 movie You’re Next about three merciless, masked killers on a violent rampage. And yet, with Wingard dwelling heavily in franchise work for the past decade with Death Note, Blair Witch, and two Godzilla/Kong movies, it’s nice to see him get back to his earlier style and show why Carpenter’s approach still gets the blood pumping. Onslaught can be brisk to the point of anemia, but its relentless pace ensures that it never loses our attention.

Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a military veteran with PTSD who spends her days sharpshooting and managing a trailer park in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately for Celeste and her neighbors, there’s a top-secret facility creating super soldiers for domestic warfare, and, whoopsie-doodle, its three super soldiers (dubbed “Crybaby,” “Cockroach,” and “The Butcher”) escape and will kill anything in their path until they can be put down. That path includes Celeste, her young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), fellow vet neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), cowardly cop Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), and the rest of the trailer park, which must fight to survive against the…well, you saw the title of the movie.

Wingard briefly alludes to a deeper idea of how veterans are discarded when they’re of no longer use to America’s war machine. The opening credits in particular show America as a war-hungry nation, and how twisted it is that the government has no problem employing fascists if it means advancing “national security,” especially against its own people. It also feels a bit timely considering how much President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and various Republican senators want to sic U.S. troops on American citizens. The coloring of Onslaught is outlandish, but its underlying menace? Not so much.

However, the movie never wants to dig too deeply lest it lose its sense of violent escapism. The characters are broad sketches, but there was clearly a lot of glee in designing ones like “third-generation Operation Paperclip” German scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens, whose look made me giggle every time he was on screen), his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall), and the evil company rep Cyrus (Drew Starkey) sent in to orchestrate the coverup but also observe the havoc wrought by the super soldiers. The film feels the need to include that the Kammlers and Cyrus are into BDSM, but the kinkiness is merely added color to show that pain psychologically afflicts Celeste, yet it's a joy to our villains.

The movie can rarely probe any deeper than that, but at a fleet-footed 92 minutes, it doesn’t matter since Wingard knows he wants to unleash the chaos. The film’s first act even has a little countdown title card to let you know how close we are to the onslaught, so that if you need to use the restroom, you won’t miss any of the carnage. It’s all knowingly bombastic and consciously evokes the grittiness of Carpenter’s siege works like Assault on Precinct 13 and Prince of Darkness while still remaining upbeat in its visuals and score. It’s all, like The Guest, unapologetic homage, and I’m happy to get on board that train since even Carpenter stopped making these kinds of movies as he got into the 1990s and 2000s. If another director wants to do the throwback, I say let them.

There are no shortage of nostalgia thrills these days, but Onslaught understands you can get them on the cheap and without needing the weight of IP. For fans of R-rated 80s action-thrillers, there’s just as much of a joy as seeing actors like VelJohnson or Michael Biehn as some recognizable character from an earlier story. Wingard and Barrett are clearly indulging their own fandom here sprinkled with some broad military critique since Carpenter never ran from subtext either. It doesn’t make for a particular deep movie, but it will get you hooting and hollering with its bloody mayhem.

Onslaught opens in theaters on September 4.