The clearest thing about Onslaught is that its director Adam Wingard is clearly a fan of elaborate action movies from the 1980s. His cast includes two actors closely associated with that era and genre and his film is over-the-top in its premise in a way that recalls the Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies of that time. The differences are that rather than carve his protagonist out of that mold of muscular behemoth, that is instead applied to the villains while the heroine is a gritty and competent war vet; and that the movie is considerably more violent than even the roughest of those films ever got. It is indiscriminate violence which probably accounts for a chunk of the shock (though bloody , the film isn’t actually very graphic), but it is still notable, as are the particular identities of its perpetrators. Onslaught in fact falls neatly into the sci-fi or superhero fiction mold in the central tenet of its premise, which amounts basically to a spin on the Marvel ‘Super-soldier’ id...
The vibe that underscores I Want Your Sex hasn’t really been seen in a while and it perhaps does require some context to really appreciate. In the 1990s, there arose a movement on the American indie scene that has come to be known as the New Queer Cinema -born out of a wave of LGBTQ filmmakers coming into their own in tandem with a gradually more common social visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ themes, culture, politics, and people. Some of the creatives to burst forth from this movement managed to break into the mainstream, like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. Others, like Gregg Araki, remained largely in the underground. Watching Araki’s early films it is easy to see why -he has a rambunctious sensibility, a very camp style of satire, and a cavalier attitude around sex. Hollywood wasn’t quite going to embrace his art. And it still hasn’t, elder statesman of queer cinema though he has now become. He dialed back these proclivities on some of his later films (his last, White Bird in a B...