Onslaught

There were three new releases in theaters over the long Labor Day weekend, including By Any Means, Fall 2: Deadpoint, and Onslaught, but because I am not a big fan of Mark Walhberg and because I don't particularly like heights, my nephew and I defaulted to Onslaught last night.  Let's just say that it wasn't a good weekend for movies.  Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a former Army sniper suffering from PTSD who now manages a trailer park in a remote desert in New Mexico.  At a nearby top secret government facility, the maniacal Nazi scientist Dr. Hans Krammer (Dan Stevens) is leading an experimental program to develop a group of super soldiers who do not have a conscience, who do not feel pain, and who will not stop until the mission is complete.  During a training exercise, the latest subjects, known as the Crybaby (Tyler Hall), the Cockroach (Dave Campbell), and the Butcher (Alex Pereira), escape from the facility and terrorize the nearby civilian population.  They end up at the trailer park and kill the majority of the residents until Celeste, her young daughter (Blake Kennedy), a grizzled Vietnam veteran (Reginald VelJohnson), and a police officer (Eric Wareheim) make a stand against them.  Meanwhile, a government operative named Cyrus (Drew Starkey) is called in to contain the situation but is revealed to be working with Dr. Krammer's widow Hanna (Rebecca Hall) to preserve the research.  This is a pastiche of much better slasher movies from the 1980s, especially those of John Carpenter, and I was really disappointed by the action sequences because, while some of them are suitably fun and gory (particularly the one at a convenience store), the super soldiers spend more time posing in silhouette than attacking and the final confrontation is very anticlimactic.  There are some weird tonal shifts (Stevens and Starkey are both little freaks in some shocking scenes that are completely superfluous) as well as commentary about the military that is introduced and then goes nowhere.  Arjona does a good job with what she is given but her character is thinly drawn and the connection between Cleleste and the Butcher seems shoehorned in.  This is definitely one you can miss (maybe we should have seen By Any Means).