GENRE | Adria Arjona Terminates 'Onslaught'

"Prolonged exposure breaks the mind."

A24 / VVS Films

After a stint in big-budget Godzilla vs. Kong fare, indie genre director Adam Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett reteam for The Terminator-inspired action-slasher thriller, Onslaught. Starring a battered and bruised Adria Arjona as a PTSD-suffering, former army sniper battling against an experimental rogue team of genetically engineered, chainsaw-wielding super-soldiers, the slick but ultimately underwhelming 1970-80s John Carpenter homage sets up a straightforward midnight movie.

Co-starring Wingard regular Dan Stevens as a comical Nazi scientist, Drew Starkey, Eric Wareheim, and TGIF Family Matters star Reginald VelJohnson as a cohort of snarky side characters (with Blake Kennedy as Arjon's young daughter), we are dropped into a sparse New Mexico desert town and rundown trailer park full of isolated army veterans. When three presumed-dead, zombified soldiers escape a private military base, they set their sights on eliminating the local population like unstoppable killing machines with no other motives.

Arjona shines in the simple, masculine action hero role as Onslaught wages a bullet-riddled, bloody grindhouse B-movie that, while half-baked, does not lack for style or effort. It's lean and mean genre schlock full of gnarly kills and stylish violence that mines shadowy, anti-government conspiracy theories for its narrow secret military experiment gone wrong plotline. It's essentially two halves, first setting things up before an extended action sequence of raging mayhem, but there's ultimately not much there there beyond throwback fun across its 92 minutes.


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