Onslaught Review: Super Soldiers, Chainsaws and Dan Stevens Licking High Heels
There are films influenced by John Carpenter, and then there are films that appear to have broken into John Carpenter’s house, stolen his synthesiser, rifled through his VHS collection and driven away in his car. Adam Wingard’s Onslaught falls firmly into the second category. Imagine Assault on Precinct 13 colliding with Universal Soldier in a trailer park, throw in buckets of blood, glowing eyes, chainsaws and Dan Stevens licking his wife’s high heels, and you’ve got a fairly accurate description of the madness awaiting you.
Stevens plays Hans Kammler, a scientist whose interests apparently include sexual fetishes and resurrecting dead soldiers. We all need hobbies. Hans has created three genetically enhanced super soldiers who have been stripped of irritating human weaknesses such as emotion, compassion and the ability to walk past a room full of people without slaughtering everybody inside it.
Government man Baylor (Michael Biehn) arrives to see whether all that lovely government money has been well spent, and the undead trio are placed into a combat exercise against living soldiers. Leading the super-powered lunatics is The Butcher, played by UFC champion Alex Pereira, which feels slightly unfair on the ordinary soldiers before the doors have even closed. Unsurprisingly, the experiment demonstrates that Hans has created extremely effective killing machines. Unfortunately, nobody appears to have included an off switch.
The three soldiers turn on the people responsible for creating them, tear through the facility and escape into the outside world. This is generally considered poor laboratory etiquette, although bringing homicidal soldiers back from the dead was probably the first indication that workplace health and safety wasn’t especially high on Hans’ list of priorities.
Onslaught – Welcome to the Trailer Park
Elsewhere, Celeste (Adria Arjona) manages an isolated trailer park after leaving the military. Her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) lives primarily with her father, but Celeste suddenly finds herself looking after her when the youngster is dropped off unexpectedly. Celeste isn’t particularly delighted about this development, which initially makes her slightly difficult to warm to. Daisy is your daughter, love, not a sofa somebody has abandoned outside your caravan because the council wouldn’t collect it.
Fortunately, Arjona gradually finds considerably more humanity in Celeste than that introduction suggests. Mother and daughter settle into their unexpected time together, with Celeste teaching Daisy the important survival skill of how to properly attack a burrito with your hands. Given what is heading towards them, enjoying lunch while you still possess all your limbs is probably sensible advice.
The super soldiers have meanwhile discovered a truck stop, where they decide to massacre innocent customers and staff for no discernible reason beyond the fact that murdering people is essentially their entire personality. It is a vicious sequence and establishes that Wingard isn’t planning to make his genetically engineered killers misunderstood souls waiting for somebody to discover the good inside them. There isn’t any good inside them. There might not be anything inside them except bullets, rage and whatever Hans used instead of a functioning personality.
Eventually the killers reach Celeste’s trailer park and the film settles into the siege scenario it has been building towards. Celeste’s military experience suddenly becomes extremely useful, while neighbour Josiah is played by Reginald VelJohnson, instantly giving Onslaught another connection to the great action cinema of the past. Yes, it’s Al Powell from Die Hard, the Twinkie-loving policeman who spent Christmas talking to Bruce Willis over a radio. Apparently retirement didn’t work out, because now he’s fighting undead super soldiers in a trailer park.
John Carpenter Called. He Wants His Synthesiser Back
Wingard makes absolutely no attempt to disguise the film’s influences. Matthew Pusti’s electronic score, Oren Soffer’s shadowy photography, the isolated setting and the siege structure all carry the unmistakable scent of Carpenter, while resurrected military killing machines naturally bring Universal Soldier into the conversation. The difference is that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren could actually speak. These lads aren’t interested in conversation unless chainsaw noises count as dialogue.
There is plenty of grindhouse nastiness thrown into the mixture too. Blood sprays, limbs disappear and bodies receive the sort of structural alterations that would make an orthopaedic surgeon simply pack up and go home. Onslaught looks particularly good at night, with smoke, darkness, coloured lighting and the soldiers’ glowing eyes creating some genuinely striking imagery. When Wingard concentrates on making these figures stalk their victims through the darkness, the film comes closest to achieving the threatening atmosphere it clearly wants.
Then Dan Stevens starts licking shoes and you remember what you’re watching.
Hans’ relationship with his wife Hanna, played by Rebecca Hall, is deliberately bizarre, with the scientist crawling around on all fours during one particularly memorable encounter. Elsewhere, government clean-up man Cyrus (Drew Starkey) is introduced enjoying an impressive quantity of drugs while surrounded by semi-naked women in rubber and strange masks. He is subsequently called in to deal with the escaped soldiers, presumably because every competent government employee was having the weekend off.
These sequences certainly contribute to Onslaught’s anything-goes personality, but they don’t contribute an awful lot to the actual story. Hall in particular feels strangely underused considering what an interesting presence she is. The film occasionally seems to stop what it is doing, open a door into another, considerably weirder movie for five minutes, then close it and get back to the murderous soldiers.
The Butcher Needs a Bigger Fight
The biggest disappointment concerns The Butcher. Pereira has exactly the physical presence required for the role, looking like somebody who could punch through a caravan and then complain that the caravan had hurt his hand. We also discover that Celeste knew him during their military service, with a previous confrontation ending when she introduced his testicles to her boot. Naturally, this establishes the expectation of a substantial rematch once the pair eventually meet again.
Instead, the confrontation is over far too quickly. Celeste sliding along on her knees while wielding a massive chainsaw certainly gives us a gloriously ridiculous image, but after establishing The Butcher as an almost unstoppable killing machine, we wanted these two to properly batter each other. Throw somebody through a wall. Smash a table. Hit Pereira with a fridge. Let him pick the fridge up and hit her back with it. We aren’t difficult to please.
This is Onslaught’s biggest problem generally. Wingard spends the early stages convincing us that these super soldiers are terrifyingly efficient, yet they become considerably less intimidating once they arrive at the trailer park and encounter somebody the screenplay actually needs to keep alive. The film promises an enormous final eruption of violence but never quite delivers the sustained confrontation that would justify all the preparation.
Arjona nevertheless throws herself into the role and becomes increasingly enjoyable as Celeste switches into survival mode. VelJohnson is great fun whenever Josiah appears, while simply having Michael Biehn wandering around a film involving military experiments and murderous super soldiers generates enough nostalgic goodwill to power a small town. We’d happily have taken considerably more of him, although perhaps nobody wanted him solving the entire situation by shouting that he’s dealt with worse things on LV-426.
Onslaught is ultimately a strange, bloody and knowingly ridiculous action-horror throwback. It has a cracking electronic score, some impressive photography, plenty of gore and a cast seemingly assembled by somebody spinning a giant wheel labelled “People We’d Quite Like to See Fighting Super Soldiers”. Wingard understands the pleasures of the films he’s referencing, even if recreating Carpenter’s ingredients isn’t the same thing as possessing Carpenter’s ability to turn a simple concept into something unforgettable.
Still, there are considerably worse ways to spend an evening than watching Adria Arjona defend a trailer park while Reginald VelJohnson lends a hand, Alex Pereira wanders around looking murderous and Dan Stevens gives footwear the sort of attention normally reserved for a romantic lead. Onslaught never reaches the heights of Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog or the other Carpenter classics it frequently evokes, and its disappointingly brief confrontations keep it from becoming the full-blooded action-horror riot it could have been. But when the synths are pumping, the blood is spraying and somebody reaches for a chainsaw, it’s difficult not to have some fun. Sometimes cinema doesn’t need to change your life. Sometimes it just needs to remove somebody’s arm.
