Just what is an A24 film at this point? The once niche indie studio is now well into its teen-hood, having been founded in 2012, and no longer seems content to churn out a steady diet of thoughtful horror and horror-adjacent fare. Over the past couple of years, the studio has espoused an interest in producing bigger, dumber, more commercial-type offerings, leaving the arthouse for the charnel house, as it were (even as A24’s Backrooms, an indie flick if ever there were one has grossed close to $400 million worldwide this summer).
This brings us to Adam Wingard’s cinematic embolism, a half-assed ‘80s action/horror homage that works diligently to get its intriguing premise off the ground before devolving into a morass of tired tropes, frenetic sound detonations, and frequent soundtrack needle drops. All with a 7-year-old girl in tow.
Certainly, as an elevator pitch and nothing more, the film rocks foxy, to use the ‘80s vernacular. Somewhere in rural New Mexico, a mad, one-eyed Nazi scientist, Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens, wearing one of the more distracting bald wigs in recent movie history) — with a fetish for the feet of his wife, Hanna (Rebecca Hall, for some reason) — works with a private military contractor to create a trio of neo-zombie super-soldiers, whose only purpose is to kill every living thing in a given battlefield.
Predictably, during testing with live soldiers, led by another military attache (Michael Biehn), the trio of glowing-eyed killers go berzerk, wipe out the containment staff and go on a rampage through the New Mexico countryside. Eventually, they arrive at a desolate trailer park, run by a former Army special forces sniper named Celeste (Adria Arjona), whose young daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), has recently been deposited with her. The ensuing, extremely bloody battle between Celeste, a few surviving residents, and the super soldiers, runs over the course of a single evening of carnage.
Initially, Wingard, working from a script hammered out alongside frequent co-screenwriter Simon Barrett, takes his time establishing the different players — the film begins with a countdown clock, just to keep things moving. We see Hans at home with his wife, before putting on a Luke Skywalker cape and getting whisked away by a Blackhawk to the secret testing facility; watch Celeste get into a heated argument with her ex-husband (Jacob Scipio), after he unexpectedly drops Daisy off to her; meet some of the other park residents, including Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), another vet; and Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), a local cop who listens to a self-help soundtrack in his squad car.
Even the trio of super-soliders, including the Cockroach (Dave Campbell), the Crybaby (Tyler Hall), and their leader, the Butcher (Alex Periera) are given formal introductions by the adoring Hans. So far, so good enough. The film is at least smart enough to know what it’s trying to emulate, the kind of messy, throw-back, ‘80s bloodsport that would leave its audience of (mostly) young men cheering in the aisles with every inventively fresh kill.
The problem arises when the preliminaries are finally dispensed with and the film has to get into the action pay-off it’s been setting up all this time. The script, barely hanging on as it is, suddenly goes rudderless, and the action — as the soldiers are blasting through the flimsy doors of the trailer homes, and hacking the occupants into pieces — turns off-paced and brutally predictable. It might seem strange to say, but the successful version of these films thrive precisely on the daring, creative ways the carnage is dispensed (think of Emil’s untimely demise — melting away from nuclear waste exposure and then hit by a hurtling sedan in Robocop). It’s not enough to load up the blood squibs and machetes, for the brutal sadism to resonate, it has to work in unexpected, if not shocking, ways.
Unfortunately, the soldier trio — shown in (effectively eerie) silhouette more times than Nosferatu — tend to work their mayhem in straightforward ways: A meat-cleaver here, a chainsaw there, and so forth. About as creative as the film gets is when one unfortunate trailer park resident gets killed over his flaming grill, leaving the body to char throughout the course of the night.
That’s not the only failure to connect here. Wingard and co. have a penchant for going from blaring, loud explosions of sound to dead silence, a trick that works to unnerve the audience only so much before feeling repetitive and played out.
Indeed, the filmmakers seem to find rake after rake with which to smack in their faces: the aforementioned bald cap that Stevens wears so unconvincingly (such that every second of screentime with him feels interminable); Daisy, cute as she is, becoming far more of a constant presence in the film than is required, eventually her earnest innocence becoming yet another distraction from our supposed good time; and Celeste herself, portrayed as a super-badass, but saved over and over again by the elderly Josiah to the point where when she finally has a showdown with the Butcher, her meant-to-be killer catchphrase (“Bitch, you messed with the wrong mother”) falls as flat as three-day old seltzer.
Wingard, who was behind the vastly better You’re Next some years ago, makes a sort of wan gesture towards A24’s A24-ness with Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a high-level clean-up man, brought in to fix the mess Kammler’s trio has left behind. We first meet him at an expensive S&M club, tripping his face off on “pure MDMA.” But he isn’t given much to do other than shoot a badly wounded survivor, and offer what could be called professional appreciation for what Celeste manages to accomplish.
With a film that has virtually nothing to say other than carnage for carnage’s sake, it’s awfully laborious to watch. Wingard and co. might well have gotten the basic premise of an ‘80s flick on point — see also the use of Die Hard’s VelJohnson and The Terminator’s Biehn for nostalgia kicks — but they forgot the part where those films, sophomoric as they may be, are meant to be uproarious fun to watch.
