How much of a purist are you about Halloween? Do you wait until October 1st to start your annual horror movie binge, or does Spooky Season start in your household the second summer ends? Regardless of your personal timetable, the new Adam Wingard actioner Onslaught has already officially fired the starting pistol for this year’s Halloween season. The genre-ambiguous John Carpenter homage opens with actress Adria Arjona aiming automatic assault rifles at her backyard collection of Halloween-branded jack-o-lanterns, spraying the desert landscape with pumpkin guts and bullet casings. It’s an image that calls into question whether Onslaught will be veering more towards action, horror, horror-action, or action-horror, then declares, “Who cares? Let’s get out there and smash some pumpkins!”

Wingard reteams with screenwriter Simon Barrett to indulge in the same action-horror mixture they played with in previous cult breakouts You’re Next & The Guest, this time applied to a limited-location siege picture set in a rural trailer park. After a nearby top-secret government science lab (headed by Dan Stevens as a Nazi mad scientist) loses track of its collection of undead supersoldier mutants in an experiment gone horribly wrong, a single mother (Arjona) finds herself defending her modest trailer park fiefdom and the poor innocent souls who reside there (most importantly, Eric Warheim as the local deputy drunk and Reginald VelJohnson as the war vet with a heart of tarnished gold). The world of Onslaught is sparse and underpopulated, but the personalities who fill it are cartoonishly big, especially the Nazi mutant killing machines that attack innocent civilians with a chainsaw, meat cleaver, and guns galore. It’s a military thriller shot and edited like a monster movie, with constant stylistic references to Carpenter’s oeuvre in its synths, text, and squibs.

Onslaught makes some vague onscreen gestures towards contemporary political commentary, but they’re more implied than explored. The opening credits play over a chaotic crash course in the past few decades of American military evils, catching the audience up to the exact fascistic moment we’re currently suffering: the one where the government has deployed a heavily armed, morally unscrupulous army of subhuman freaks against its own everyday civilians. The roided-out zombie mutants that escape containment in the first act are mostly hidden from view as shadowy silhouettes, presented as a force of supernatural evil devoid of any discernible humanity. Once we get a good look at them, though, it’s clear they’ve been costumed to recall federal ICE agents, with makeshift face coverings continuing to obscure their personhood and only the pinhole lights of their inhuman eyes left visible to the public. They make for legitimately scary movie monsters, and they directly echo imagery recently broadcast on the national news.

Politically, I don’t think Onslaught has any more to say about ICE’s state-sanctioned public executions than the vintage VHS title Maniac Cop had to say about maniac cops; it just recognizes that these militarized mutant C.H.U.D.s are scary to the average everyday citizen and exploits that fear to spin an entertaining yarn. Emotionally, there isn’t much to latch onto in the film either. Our gun-nut heroine’s hyperviolent efforts to protect her daughter and her tenants get the heart pumping by injecting it with adrenaline, not by pulling at the strings. This is largely a for-its-own-sake stylistic exercise designed to stoke easy nostalgia for action-horror-loving mouthbreathers, pitched at a DTV-tolerant audience but performed by grossly overqualified cast & crew (including brief glimpses of Rebecca Hall as the Nazi scientist’s wife/dominatrix). It is delicious, though, like a piece of Halloween candy unwrapped a month early in overeager giddiness for the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet