Sometimes a movie knows exactly what it wants to be, embraces it completely and never apologizes for the carnage that follows.

Onslaught is that kind of movie.

Director Adam Wingard returns to the smaller-scale genre filmmaking that helped establish his career, delivering a violent, stylish and wonderfully unhinged action-horror throwback that feels ripped from another era and injected with modern filmmaking muscle.

It’s loud. It’s bloody. It’s ridiculous in all the right ways.

And most importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Adria Arjona stars as Celeste, a former Army sniper living with her daughter when a squad of genetically engineered super soldiers escapes from a secret military facility. What begins as a relatively contained survival story quickly becomes something much nastier as Celeste is forced to rely on the skills she thought she’d left behind.

Arjona absolutely owns the movie.

There’s a physicality to her performance that makes Celeste believable as someone capable of surviving the insanity Wingard throws at her, but Arjona also gives the character enough vulnerability to keep Onslaught from becoming nothing more than an exercise in bloodshed.

The movie surrounds her with an appropriately bizarre ensemble that includes Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, Drew Starkey, Rebecca Hall and UFC fighter Alex Pereira as the imposing Butcher.

Stevens, in particular, seems perfectly at home in Wingard’s twisted world. Anyone who remembers what the actor and director accomplished together with The Guest knows just how entertaining that combination can be.

But Onslaught ultimately belongs to Arjona.

Onslaught [A24]

Once the movie unleashes her, Celeste becomes the type of action hero genre fans rarely get anymore. She’s tough without becoming invincible, vulnerable without being helpless and completely convincing when it’s time to fight back.

Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett aren’t trying to reinvent the action-horror genre here. They’re playing with the toys that made it fun in the first place.

There are shades of The Terminator, old-school siege movies, slashers and the grimy grindhouse films that clearly helped inspire the filmmakers. Early reviews have similarly pointed toward the movie’s throwback influences, with critics describing it as a gory action-slasher and a love letter to grindhouse filmmaking.

That’s part of its charm.

Onslaught isn’t interested in sanding down its edges. The violence is nasty, the humor is dark and Wingard lets the movie get increasingly strange as the bodies begin piling up.

At just 92 minutes, it also doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Onslaught [A24]

There are moments when the buildup takes longer than expected, and viewers expecting nonstop action from the opening scene may be surprised by how deliberately Wingard sets the pieces in place. That’s also been the biggest criticism among some early reviews, which argue that the film takes too long to fully unleash its premise.

But when Onslaught finally lets loose, it delivers exactly the kind of blood-soaked genre chaos it promises.

This isn’t prestige filmmaking pretending to be a B-movie.

It’s a B-movie made by filmmakers who clearly love B-movies.

And there’s something refreshing about that.

Wingard gives audiences a nasty little action-horror movie built for the big screen, while Arjona proves she is more than capable of carrying an action franchise on her shoulders.

Onslaught is violent, weird, stylish and unapologetically excessive.

In other words, exactly what it should be.

“A bloody, brutal blast from start to finish.”

Onslaught hits theaters September 4 from A24

There is something inherently unsettling about the overly cheerful world of children’s television. The colorful sets, catchy songs, talking objects and giant costumed characters are designed to make kids feel safe. Buddy takes all of that childhood comfort, twists it into something deeply disturbing and somehow manages to make the result as funny as it is horrifying.

Directed by Casper Kelly, the filmmaker behind the cult Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, Buddy is exactly the kind of horror comedy that could have fallen apart almost immediately. A murderous orange unicorn from a 1990s-style children’s television show sounds like a great five-minute joke. Stretching that premise into a feature film is another story.

Somehow, Kelly makes it work.

The movie introduces audiences to It’s Buddy!, an impossibly upbeat children’s program hosted by Buddy, a towering orange unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key. Buddy sings, dances and teaches his young friends important lessons, all while surrounded by the type of talking furniture, puppets and colorful characters that would have felt perfectly at home on television three decades ago.

Then one of the children stops playing along.

That is when Buddy begins revealing what kind of movie it really is.

Buddy [credit: BoulderLight Pictures]

As Buddy’s cheerful personality becomes increasingly threatening, Freddy (Delaney Quinn) and the other children begin questioning the world around them. Their attempt to escape Buddy’s increasingly dangerous playground eventually leads beyond the familiar television set and into a much stranger world.

Meanwhile, Cristin Milioti plays Grace, a mother in the real world who begins experiencing the disturbing feeling that someone is missing from her life, even though she cannot quite understand who that person might be.

It would be easy for Buddy to rely entirely on the joke of turning a Barney-like children’s character into a killer. Instead, Kelly keeps expanding the idea. The movie jumps between the television program, the outside world and increasingly bizarre environments that make it feel as though audiences are slowly discovering just how large Buddy’s nightmare actually is.

The production design is a huge part of why it works. It’s Buddy! genuinely looks like something pulled from a VHS tape sitting in a box since 1997. The cheap-looking sets, overly enthusiastic songs, goofy characters and dated television production aren’t merely background details. They are essential to the movie’s personality.

And once the violence begins, that artificial happiness makes everything happening on screen considerably more disturbing.

Keegan-Michael Key is particularly effective as Buddy. He never needs to completely abandon the character’s upbeat children’s-host personality to become frightening. In fact, Buddy is often at his creepiest when he is desperately trying to maintain that smile and convince everyone that they are still having fun.

Buddy [credit: BoulderLight Pictures]

The supporting cast is equally game for the insanity. Patton Oswalt voices a talking backpack named Strappy, while Michael Shannon appears as the cowboy puppet Willie. Topher Grace also stars alongside Milioti, but it is young Delaney Quinn who gives the movie much of its heart as Freddy.

Most importantly, Buddy understands exactly what kind of movie it wants to be.

This is not restrained horror. It is strange, bloody, absurd and intentionally ridiculous. Kelly throws children’s television, slasher horror, dark comedy and surrealism into the same blender and rarely seems interested in asking whether he has gone too far.

Buddy [credit: BoulderLight Pictures]

That commitment is what makes the movie so much fun.

Not every gag lands, and there are moments when Buddy threatens to stretch its central joke beyond its limits. But whenever the movie begins feeling comfortable, Kelly usually introduces another bizarre character, disturbing revelation or wonderfully ridiculous piece of violence to pull audiences back into Buddy’s world.

There is also something surprisingly effective underneath all the blood and comedy. Buddy plays with the strange relationship adults have with the television shows they loved as children. Looking back, some of those programs were genuinely bizarre. Giant creatures demanded participation, characters stared directly into the camera waiting for children to answer them and everyone repeatedly insisted that viewers were their friends.

Buddy simply asks what happens when one of those characters actually means it.

The answer is one of the strangest horror comedies of the year.

Buddy isn’t interested in reinventing horror. It just takes an incredibly fun idea and commits to it with enough creativity, nostalgia and unapologetic weirdness to make the whole thing work.

You may never look at a friendly children’s television mascot quite the same way again.

There is something almost impossibly fitting about the journey of Coyote vs. Acme. A movie centered around Wile E. Coyote, a character defined by getting flattened, blown up, dropped off cliffs and somehow coming back for another try, was itself nearly erased from existence before finding a way back.

Thankfully, it did.

Coyote vs. Acme isn’t just the curiosity many expected after years of headlines surrounding its shelving. It’s a genuinely funny, surprisingly heartfelt celebration of the Looney Tunes that understands exactly why these characters have survived for generations.

Directed by Dave Green, the film takes one of the simplest running jokes in animation history and asks a question that suddenly seems completely reasonable: After decades of defective rockets, exploding bird seed, malfunctioning traps and other catastrophically unreliable products, why hasn’t Wile E. Coyote sued ACME?

That’s exactly what he does.

Wile E. teams with struggling attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, to take ACME Corporation to court over the company’s long history of products that have repeatedly exploded in his face. Standing on the other side is ACME’s powerful attorney Buddy Crane, played with exactly the kind of exaggerated confidence you’d expect from John Cena.

It’s a ridiculous premise, but the movie commits to it.

Rather than simply using the Looney Tunes characters as decoration around another live action story, Coyote vs. Acmemanages to bring their world into ours without stripping away what makes it special. Cartoon logic still applies. Explosions happen. Characters survive things no living creature possibly could. Elaborate contraptions go spectacularly wrong.

Most importantly, it actually feels like Looney Tunes.

That has been one of the biggest challenges for previous attempts to bring these characters into live action. Here, the filmmakers aren’t embarrassed by the absurdity. They embrace it.

Forte proves to be an ideal human counterpart for Wile E. Coyote. His comedic style has always worked best when playing characters who are slightly desperate, slightly defeated and somehow still convinced things might eventually work out. Pairing him with perhaps the most relentlessly unsuccessful character in animation history turns out to be a perfect match.

Cena is having even more fun. His ability to completely commit to absurd comedy has become one of his greatest strengths as an actor, and Coyote vs. Acme gives him plenty of opportunities to lean into it.

But Wile E. remains the star.

For a character who barely needs words, the movie finds an impressive amount of emotion underneath the slapstick. His endless pursuit of the Road Runner has always been funny because he refuses to quit. Here, that stubbornness becomes something unexpectedly meaningful.

The movie even manages to find a little heart inside all the falling anvils and exploding rockets.

That doesn’t mean everything lands perfectly. Some of the human material isn’t as entertaining as the animated chaos surrounding it, and there are stretches where the courtroom story slows down the manic Looney Tunes energy. Not every joke hits, either.

But the misses rarely linger because another gag is usually seconds away.

Early critical reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s easy to understand why. The Hollywood Reporter called the movie a “hilarious delight,” while praising it as one of the best combinations of live action and animation. Variety highlighted the movie’s ability to pack Road Runner style destruction, references and Looney Tunes Easter eggs into its courtroom comedy. Deadline went even further, comparing the film favorably to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Those are lofty comparisons, and Coyote vs. Acme doesn’t quite reach the all time greatness of Roger Rabbit. But the fact that the comparison doesn’t feel completely ridiculous says plenty about how well this movie works.

John Cena, Coyote vs Acme [credit: Warner Bros. Pictures]

There’s also an unavoidable layer of irony surrounding the entire story.

Warner Bros. Discovery originally planned to shelve the completed film, turning it into one of Hollywood’s most controversial examples of finished projects being abandoned for financial reasons. After enormous backlash from filmmakers, actors and fans, the movie eventually escaped that fate and found a new home with Ketchup Entertainment.

That history makes the movie’s story about a powerless individual taking on an enormous corporation almost comically appropriate.

You couldn’t write a better marketing campaign.

More importantly, audiences now get the opportunity to decide whether the movie deserved to survive.

It did.

Coyote vs. Acme isn’t revolutionary, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s funny, charming, energetic and clearly made by people who genuinely love these characters. Instead of attempting to reinvent the Looney Tunes for modern audiences, it remembers that great characters don’t always need reinventing.

Sometimes you just need to give Wile E. Coyote another rocket, point him toward the Road Runner and get out of the way.

After everything Coyote vs. Acme went through just to reach a theater screen, perhaps there was never a more appropriate movie to prove that getting knocked down doesn’t mean you’re finished.