Looking for a dumb-shit horror flick that's as dull as it is preposterous? Boy, do we have the movie for you....
MPI / 90 Minutes / 2012 / Rated R / Street Date: July 31, 2012
Two dudes stuck in an ATM booth with a hot chick in a tight sweater - this might make for a boner-ific adult film, but in ATM, the new mind-trip horror suspense thriller, the shtick wears thin before its first fifteen minutes unfold. I don't even want to use the term 'Hitchcockian' here, because this smooth-brained genre picture is so blankly obvious and heavy-handed that Hitch would have never even let these guys finish a story pitch.
So there are two guys - David (Brian Geraghty) and Corey (Josh Peck) - who take the sexy young Emily (Alice Eve) home from a holiday business party, and they decide they don't want the evening to end so early. There's a pizza joint, a recollection that said greasy spoon only accepts cash (see where I'm going with this?), a jokey douchebag move where David parks their car a ways away from the central ATM in the story to allow him extra face time with the hottie... and then the masked figure shows up and people start screaming.
Yeah, it pretty much just falls apart. Without any believably tense dialogue or accomplished cinematic style, ATM succumbs to its pretenses and never recovers. Too dull to be a cheesy camp diversion and too simplistic to be conceptually challenging, ATM - even as a late-night rental genre one-off - quite simply doesn't work.
These are probably admirable young stars and perhaps they'll go on to great things, but ATMdoesn't do them any favors. All horror lovers know that watching handsome young people scream as they're faced with impending death from scary dudes with hooks or machetes or whatever is a hallmark of its style, but even if ATM makes some interesting strides in having most of its action take place in one location, at the end of the day, it's just not that great.
The stag movie version, though, is probably excellent.
