After spending nearly a decade making the literally gigantic FX extravaganzas GODZILLA VS. KONG and GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE, director Adam Wingard has returned to the territory of YOU’RE NEXT and THE GUEST – horror/action/thriller hybrids where he doesn’t have as much money but can kinda do what he wants. This time he’s armed with that blockbuster experience and a bigger small budget (three times as much as THE GUEST) courtesy of A24, so he and his long time writer Simon Barrett (FRANKENFISH) had a chance to really let ‘er rip. I thought. Maybe next time.

I hope other people will get more out of it than I did. It has many of the elements for a movie I could love. Adria Arjona (TRIPLE FRONTIER, 6 UNDERGROUND, MORBIUS, HIT MAN, but mainly Bix from Andor) is very charismatic as Celeste, a cynical war vet who purposely isolates herself in a desert town, living in and managing a trailer park, her only loves in the world the daughter she has partial custody of and the illegal stockpile of guns in the cabinet. She’s not ready when her more responsible ex (Jacob Scipio, WITHOUT REMORSE) drops off young Daisy (Blake Kennedy) on an unscheduled weekend. She missed the text about it because she was out shooting jack o’lanterns. So compared to everyone else she is pretty ready for the other unexpected guests, the rampaging super soldiers who escape from a nearby secret military site and start killing everybody.

An unusual (humblebrag?) disclaimer here: It occurred to me a little ways into the movie that it has some slight overlap with my book Worm on a Hook, because I think we’re both trying to cross-pollinate the horror trope of the unkillable slasher with the action trope of the out of control super soldier. So it’s possible that makes me more opinionated than normal people about how this sort of thing should be done. But really my problem is not so much Wingard’s take on the concept as it is what he does with it (not enough, in my view).

Let’s start at the beginning. THE GUEST himself Dan Stevens plays Hans Kammler, an apparently ancient (and albino?) Nazi scientist secretly living a life of luxury and developing weapons programs for the United States. He has a beautiful and stern younger wife (Rebecca Hall, RESURRECTION) who steps on his face and calls him a good boy before work in the morning. His experiments are UNIVERSAL SOLDIER-esque – he’s somehow resurrected three veterans who went on PTSD-fueled killing sprees and turned them into drones who cannot question orders but can tighten their muscles to withstand bullets.

We hear the backstories and nicknames of the trio: The Butcher (Brazilian MMA fighter Alex Pereira) was some infamous mass murderer, The Crybaby (Tyler Hall, also stunt coordinator) was seen shedding tears while gunning down civilians in Yeoman, The Cockroach (Dave Campbell, “Detective,” DARK PHOENIX) took a bunch of bullets but got back up, you couldn’t squash him. It’s such a great introduction and then for the rest of the movie they’re silhouetted soldier guys with glowing eyes, pretty scary looking but indistinguishable from one another. I guess they use different weapons, and I assume the one using the hatchet for a while is The Butcher, but otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference, didn’t notice them using their specialties. Mostly they just shoot guns. Maybe we didn’t need three of them.

Kammler does a demonstration where they fight against regular soldiers, and they kill them. Then they kill him and escape, which seems to have been his plan – either that or just a turn of events that made him proud. He has dedicated his life to creating a soldier who won’t say no when asked to kill civilians, which I’m pretty sure you don’t need mad science for, we already have a ton of those assholes. You don’t know about cops? This Nazi and this movie seem hopelessly out of date on that point.

In other ways, though, it’s a movie made for 2026. I like that these killers are thick-necked brutes piled in layers of stupid tactical bullshit, one or more of them wearing one of those dumb ass skull gaiters, they’re probly trained to fight but who gives a shit because they’re gonna clomp around and blow holes in people with giant guns instead. They were soldiers, but now they’re being used against Americans so they’re cops, they’re I.C.E. They go into a mini-mart and blow a bunch of people away, so they’re mass shooters. They take orders from Nazis, so they’re Nazis. And they’re in kind of a horror movie, so they’re slashers. All of those things are conflated into one, because they’re all pretty related. That’s the statement I take from this.

The opening credits play over a montage of clips and headlines that goes backwards in time, starting with modern military robots, skipping back through Obama, Bush, Bush I, Nixon, back to the beginning of Operation Paperclip. And it ends flashing between an American eagle insignia and a Nazi one. Not tip-toeing around.

With the super soldiers on the loose an operative is called to the scene. The nearest available is Cyrus (Drew Starkey, HELLRAISER 2022), who has to be yanked out of some kind of S&M club and is high on MDMA. His hair is bleached blond and shaved on the sides, it looks like Martin Gore is on the case. I liked the weirdness of this character but I think some people will take issue with which characters are involved in kink. It’s not the non-nazis, I’ll say that.

The killers, of course, end up at the trailer park. Celeste has to protect little Daisy and also her old Vietnam vet neighbor Josiah, a highlight of the movie because he’s played by motherfuckin Reginald “Al Powell” VelJohnson. Obviously we automatically love him like an old friend we haven’t seen in way too long. I got a similar kick when Michael “Kyle Reese” Biehn popped up earlier, but his character doesn’t get to do as much. He seems more there for the recognition than for what he could provide to the movie.

Another neighbor is Kovacks, who’s a cop, but he’s played by Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric, so it’s more about a goofball trying to handle this situation than pretending like his occupation gives him the necessary skills for it. He’s funny, but I guess having two veterans and a fun cop as the heroes of the movie sort of undermines my reading of it as a primal scream against armed agents of the state. I guess this is always who movies will be about.

The individual pieces are well put together. It looks good. Sounds good. THE GUEST had a good, synthy soundtrack from Steve Moore of Zombi. This time Wingard has Matthew Pusti, who did additional music on a few of his previous films. I guess he records under the name Makeup and Vanity Set, and eight of those songs were used on Stranger Things. His score is very obvious about being in the key of John Carpenter, but it works. There’s also a gimmick of using German covers of American songs, and one I heard is from the McGruff the Crime Dog album. Those work well.

Strangely, the problem I have with ONSLAUGHT is that there’s not enough onslaught. Maybe I’m wrong to assume it’s supposed to be horror mixed with action, because if there was a scene that would count as a “good kill” in a FRIDAY THE 13TH movie then I’ve already forgotten it, and if there was a memorable action sequence, I must have amnesia. There is some siege. Some shooting. A little bit of a giant chainsaw, that was fun (mainly when Celeste gets ahold of it). There’s not alot of build. It turns out the way to kill them is (spoiler) shoot one in the head and chop one up with a chainsaw, which I believe is also how you kill regular people who are not super soldiers. It doesn’t take experimenting to get there, that’s pretty much the first things she tries. Not alot of meat to this.

Like all military characters in all movies she has a traumatic combat incident she keeps flashing back to, and that turns out to connect to one of these guys, but the whole thing is so lightly sketched and quickly discarded that they barely get any drama out of it.

Really it feels like they wanted to make an action-horror movie, and they came up with the set up and the characters and everything, worked real hard, but didn’t get around to coming up with the action and horror parts. Just the surrounding material. If there was more of a movie in the middle of all that I think I would’ve liked it.

I didn’t think about this while watching it, but it’s fair to mention: UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION is about similar things, was made for 2/3 the price, has more depth and (conservatively) about 50 times as much action. Whatever the biggest action sequence is in ONSLAUGHT (and I honestly can’t think of what it would be), it’s dwarfed by, let’s say, an excerpt from just the opening scene of REGENERATION. We don’t even have to get into DAY OF RECKONING. This premise and these characters and this audience deserve more, in my opinion. And it has been done. We know it is possible.