Zombos Says: Good. Very slick and stylish, but misses some as it works harder on style than depth. Bring your earplugs if you plan on seeing this at an AMC theater. Some of my commentary may spoil your expectations.
A nod to The Guest, director Adam Wingard’s 2014 movie (along with writer Simon Barrett), also involving a military experiment gone haywire, has the troubled Celeste (Adria Arjona) shooting at carved pumpkins for target practice. A former Army sniper, she has a closet full of very lethal weapons and enough inner demons to blow those pumpkins apart, with malice. She manages the rundown trailer park, Windy Oasis, in the desert. Given the loving shot of the weapons closet early on, I was pretty darn annoyed that when hell eventually comes to Windy Oasis, all she could muster was a handgun. Sure, there’s the insanely long chainsaw to rip through doors and people, but I was still disappointed.
Not so disappointing is the synth music and 1980s grindhouse slasher-sci fi styling that carries the movie. Wingard’s imagery is intense with minimal closeups. A few strategically placed pop songs and classical music push the over the top Nazi-albino-doctor-creating-reconstituted-super soldiers to well done absurdity. Those unstoppable engines of death, with their piercing lit dots for eyes, is downright chilling to watch. A count down timer, pops up every so often to tell us when they’d be going peak destruction mode.
Going into this I was thinking of 1977’s Shockwaves with Peter Cushing as the Nazi commander in charge of the zombie super soldiers called the Death Corps. I wondered if Wingard had seen that one. Of course the action and terror in Onslaught is off the charts, but the thematic of having Nazis and neo-Nazis creating unstoppable killing machines is one trope that kind of sells itself. Overlord 2018 is another one to catch if you care to. Frankenstein’s Army 2013 is a fairly wild one too.
What keeps Onslaught from being a real killer diller are paper-thin characters, the always prevalent PTSD-laced backstory, an ex who unexpectedly drops off the kid, and some very obvious to a fault shaky-cam whenever Celeste goes toe to blow with the three psycho war machines named Cry Baby, Cockroach, and the Butcher. Before they get to Windy Oasis, though, they build their body count at Buck’s Fuel Stop, leaving one barely alive survivor who, unfortunately, meets up with the task force playing clean up after them. None of this is beyond the basics, which makes those slaughter or survival scenes so much more important to sell the movie.
Which they do, except for the shaky-cam misuse. What stands out? Their escape from the private military contractor’s facility, where the doctor’s nasty experiments are funded to a bad end result. Wingard’s styling is memorable, as any slice and dice horror scene should be. But he takes the lighting, the scoring, and the editing to heart, which is thrilling to watch. The S&M club is also intense for obvious reasons. Which begs the question, “why are neo-nazis always depicted with S&M habits? Funny how the camera held steady during that scene, but we go all shaky-blurry for the showdown action scenes. Another memorable visual is BBQ guy, which also worked as a sort of timer too, in that weird kind of horror movie way pacing.
Lean and mean gets us to the trailer park showdown as the onscreen countdown times out, after the three super soldiers steal a truck. Ever notice it’s not an American action-terror movie without guns, trucks, and macho military personnel mixing into it? Well, this one is a perfect drive-in movie that has all of that, plus a butt dance, and the over-S&M’d neo-nazis wreaking genetic terror. I was expecting more time devoted to the climax, but the ending leaves it open-ended. Wingard and Barrett left enough threads to tie up in later sequels, if they care to. Hopefully we can get to see Celeste using all those weapons, in her closet, next time.