I feel like I say this a lot: it had potential.
I also feel like I’ve said this a lot lately: the writing sucked.
ATM comes with a decent cast, featuring three actors you recognize from a hundred different things but you can’t seem to remember their names. They’re Brian Geraghty, Alice Eve, and Josh Peck, who you likely saw all over Nickelodeon back in the day. This trio does fine, perhaps better than fine. But they couldn’t overcome a poor script.
With the horror genre, consumers understand there needs to be a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. Otherwise, films about vampires, zombies, and whatever paranormal mumbo jumbo a creative wants to dream up wouldn’t work. And audiences will quickly suspend disbelief in flicks with over-the-top gore, because the spectacle of it is part of the fun, with blood and guts spraying everywhere in ways that simply isn’t true of human anatomy.
But when you’re making a suspense thriller, taking yourself very seriously in doing so, the audience needs to be capable of putting themselves in the shoes of the characters and wondering how they would react. The problem in doing that with ATM is that most everyone on the planet would have gotten out of that mess long before the characters in movie did.
The plot is basically this: a group of three friends/coworkers leave the company Christmas party on a very cold, sub-zero night. They want to go eat somewhere so one of them wants to stop at an ATM for cash. Turns out this ATM building (why it doesn’t have a drive-thru, I have no idea) is being monitored by a psychopathic killer for some unknown reason. The three friends go into the ATM building, then when they go to leave they see a creepy guy in a coat standing in the parking lot—the killer.
Now, here is the first hiccup: the three friends are immediately scared of the guy in the parka, without him doing anything but standing in the parking lot. They all agree to stay in the ATM building all because the guy in the parking lot took a step forward when they opened the door. There may be some people that would become anxious enough to stay in a building for that reason, but three friends after leaving a party, presumably with the confidence typically delivered with alcohol consumption? No.
The whole premise of the three friends staying in the building, basically waiting to be killed, without any of them having their cellphone, is ridiculous. Even though the killer frequently goes back behind the ATM building or walks over to a different lot, it’s a full three-quarters into the film until one of the characters finally decides to make a run for it. He’s then stopped by a wire that has somehow been strung up at neck level in this giant parking lot. That had to be a long fucking wire! It’s never explained how the wire got there, and it is mysteriously missing when all the police and EMS crews arrive on scene at the end.
And the ending is just plain dumb. Somehow the only survivor gets arrested. Presumably so the killer lives to kill another day. Give me a break.
PC3’s Horror and Exploitation Movie Scale of Awesomeness!
Gore - 2
Special Effects - 3
Nudity/Sexuality - 0
Wow Factor - 1
Acting - 6
Fear Factor - 4
Story/Plot/Originality - 1
Cinematography/Atmosphere - 7
Sound/Music - 4
Fun Factor - 2
ATM gets a pretty sad 30 on the PHEMSA. Despite having a pretty good cast and a nice atmospheric quality (it literally made me feel cold), it failed miserably to tell a quality story. We found it on Tubi.
Love the ad below from whenever A Savage Breed first came out!
There be Cerberus…