Entertaining Bloody Mayhem
Summary
Adam Wingard’s Halloween, The Terminator and Universal Soldier smoothie has terrific ingredients but doesn’t quite blend.
Plot: Genetically altered super soldiers go wild in the desert and a female former sniper has to stop them while protecting her daughter.
Review: From the onset, you can feel Onslaught. It’s visual, loud and in your face with bullets ripping, close ups, people and machines on the move and a pounding soundtrack. Being a fan of writer-director Adam Wingard’s The Guest and Godzilla vs. Kong movies, I was excited to see what he cooked up as a palate cleanser after back to back studio flicks. What we get is an 80’s style mash up of John Carpenter and James Cameron pastiche involving Nazi-Germany scientists working to produce the next level of modern soldier on behalf of the US government who may or may not have a problem turning them onto the general population as research.
Set in the remote desert of New Mexico, former Army Sniper Celeste (Adria Arjona, Andor) manages a small trailer park with eccentric tenants while dealing with PTSD from her time in combat and losing comrades. A bad day gets more complicated when her daughter Daisy (an adorable and adroit Blake Kennedy) shows up unexpectedly. Meanwhile, at the nearby secret military base, scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens under heavy make up, cape and German accent) is showing off his trio of enhanced super soldiers to shady contractor type Baylor (Michael Biehn, baby!). After an exhibition goes bad, the three Michael Myers armed like Unisols with Pitch Black style “shine job” eyes wreak havoc on the nearby community and end up at Celeste’s trailer park.
Onslaught moves quickly and provides plenty of bloody mayhem, violent scares, a few character moments and random laughs. Arjona does a nice job as the stressed out mom who can defend herself but it’s not exactly Lorrie Strode or Sarah Connor level. It’s nice to see Biehn on the big screen yet he’s not given a ton to do. Reginald VelJohnson (Die Hard) gets some memorable moments as Celeste’s Vietnam vet neighbor as does Eric Wareheim (Master of None) playing a sloppy and stressed cop. Back in the 80’s government conspiracies in movies were ominous and mysterious but in 2026 it feels sadly truthful with the government working directly against citizen wishes and the super soldiers reminiscent of faceless ICE types.
Wingard and co-writer Simon Barrett sprinkle plenty of sequel dust at the end so we’ll have to see what happens next.