There’s something about an isolated horror flick that just makes you feel at home. Kick your shoes off, relax, and make a snack because we’re not going anywhere. Yes, there is a huge man outside wearing a giant parka who wants to beat your face with a tire iron but hey we’re home for the night. Settle in!

Today, we’re talking about 2012’s ATM which features two guys and a girl trapped in an ATM kiosk booth in the middle of the night as the aforementioned killer wearing an Urban Legends parka stalks them. In the movie, Brian (David Hargrove) has a huge crush on Emily (Alice Eve) and finally works up the nerve to ask her out at a company party on her last day. It’s all very Can’t Hardly Wait for the white-collar workforce until his absolutely horrendous friend Corey (Josh Peck) hijacks the situation and asks for a ride home. Corey then turns into the shitty adult version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and asks for pizza. Then he needs to stop at the…..wait for it…..ATM.

The three of them end up inside the ATM booth in the freezing cold when the killer shows up outside. He murders a man walking his dog in super violent fashion so that they know he means business; then stares at them through the glass for far more than an appropriate amount of time. What is the appropriate amount of eye contact after someone watches you commit brutal murder, anyway? Assuming (or was he?) the kiosk locks from the inside unless you have a bank card, the killer then cuts off their only supply of heat and attempts to break inside the small booth as the three try to survive the night.

This film is hated by far too many. Ripped apart upon release from both critics and viewers alike. To this day, if you want to see a dead body you can just head over to anywhere that aggregates reviews and search ATM. Some of the reasons are fair and some aren’t. There was a time in horror where anything that could be conceived as a “gimmick” was immediately disregarded. In reality? These were just subgenres, not gimmicks. Found footage, M. Night style twists, “torture porn,” etc. I think some general audiences felt angered by ATM because they felt it was trying to dupe them in some way by spending 95% of the movie in a parking lot. But that’s kind of the whole point, right? What worked wonders for a thriller like Phone Booth ten years prior was considered a dumb gimmick when it came to horror. But there were some fair reasons for the hate, too.

ATM was written by Chris Sparling, the writer of the critically acclaimed Ryan Reynolds thriller Buried, and part of the vitriol may have come from folks expecting much more from the characters. There are a plethora of dumb decisions made by our characters in ATM. I mean a full buffet of full throttled dumb-shit decision making that will have you throwing literal rotten tomatoes at your own 70-inch Smart TV and screaming obscenities. The character of Corey is so obnoxious that you’ll be rooting for parka man at times. Some of the dialogue is also very Captain Obvious in a “What are we? Some kind of Suicide Squad?” sort of way. For instance, the bad guy will start to march towards them and someone will say quite blandly “Oh my God, he’s walking towards us” as we can actively already see that he is walking towards them. Some of the dialogue actually feels made up on the spot. All three of the characters we spend our time with are as one-dimensional as can be. The shitty friend, the beautiful “good” girl and the soft-spoken nice guy with no backbone who wants to date her. The few attempts to deepen any of these characters never really goes anywhere. You’ll find yourself far more interested in the villain than in what’s going on with these three.

But that’s where ATM shines!

We’re introduced to our protagonist during an almost Seven like opening credits sequence where he draws up the intricate schematics for his parking lot of pain (sounds like a WWE PPV match). He has carefully selected this very isolated ATM in this dark parking lot on this cold night. He has thought of all the angles and set traps all around the parking lot like some kind of satanic Home Alone super fan. He’s basically the Batman of murder in small places. This is all he does. His bat-cave? A storage unit in the middle of nowhere. You almost have to respect the dedication and the talent of this sicko. The planning of a Jigsaw, the physically intimidating appearance and anger of a Jason Voorhees (okay, a human Jason Voorhees) and the mystery of Michael Myers. We have no idea what in the shit his motive is. Will we ever?!

If you like your homicidal maniacs to have a sense of sadistic humor, this guy literally grabs a lawn chair at one point and pops it open (just like the dude from the famous GIF) as he sits down to watch his victims suffer. ATM may in no way be a perfect film but I feel like audiences overlooked what an interesting villain we had at the helm. Maybe I’m insane but I see Saw-like potential for a franchise here. Every Halloween. A new group of folks. A new location. How will he do it? Will anyone survive? Will they divulge any new information about him? ATM had franchise potential written all over it and I’d love to hear the creators’ thoughts on this because I can guarantee you they were thinking the same.

Though low on gore, the makeup team of ATM does a fantastic job showing our characters naturally becoming more and more like human popsicles as the film moves forward. You can feel how cold these folks are. It’s actually pretty disconcerting. When something violent happens to someone who tries to escape the booth or perhaps shows up to help, the stabs, punches and face slams into the concrete are all the more painful than they’d have felt at a normal temperature. We all know how much more it hurts to stub your toe when the house is cold. Imagine a guy the size of Goldberg smashing your face in a freezing cold parking lot. Director David Brooks does an excellent job reminding you just how cold it is, making the weather a character in and of itself.

When it comes to the ending and the twist, ATM “swings away” harder than Merrill from Signs. Like me at 38, trying to squeeze into my emo jeans, you really have to get stretchy with the material to make it work. They do a decent enough job of walking you back through certain moments to make it believable, but I think we’re all pretty skeptical that things would’ve worked out that way. I’m trying to be as spoiler free as possible here in case anyone hasn’t checked out ATM yet. But if you’ve seen it, you get it. And you should!

ATM can absolutely be a frustrating experience at times. But there’s a fascinating villain and a whole lot of “what would I do in this situation?” moments that make for a fun movie to watch on the right night. Would you just make a run for it? Try to face him one on one? Jump him? Give your friend a piggyback ride and drop them on their head? I want to say we would have all done better than our main characters here. But let’s agree to never find out, yeah?

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A sixth installment in Legendary’s 10-years-strong Monsterverse is in the works, and The Hollywood Reporter lets us know that Grant Sputore (I Am Mother) will direct the movie.

THR notes, “The new Monstervese feature is described as a continuation of the franchise centering Godzilla, Kong and an assortment of other Titans.” Stay tuned for more.

Adam Wingard, meanwhile, is returning to his roots with Onslaught, an action-thriller for A24 that’s said to be more in the vein of his earlier movies You’re Next and The Guest.

Wingard had directed both Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong.

We had recently learned that Dave Callaham (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) is writing the upcoming (and untitled) sixth movie in the Monsterverse franchise.

Beginning with the Godzilla film in 2014 and continuing through 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, and most recently the record-breaking Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Monsterverse has accumulated over $2B at the global box office and expanded into the highly successful event series, Legendary’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Apple TV+. We recently learned that “Monarch” is getting a second season, with more Monsterverse spinoff shows being planned at Apple TV+.

“Apple TV+ has struck a new multi-series deal with Legendary Entertainment, which includes multiple spinoff series based on the franchise,” the recent press release had stated.

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In a world that’s becoming increasingly more literal by the year, it’s intoxicating to realize that your eyes have betrayed you.

For many fans of genre filmmaking, that feeling is what initially pulled our tastes towards the bizarre and dream-like. It’s a realm containing stories that give us permission to discard the rational portions of our brains for a couple of hours and embrace the possibilities of the imagination. Coupled with this escape is the promise of sights that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world but are somehow made flesh. These visual achievements elicit the same sense of childlike excitement you experience when encountering a particularly convincing magician: you know you’ve been fooled but, almost giddily, have no idea how.

When we think of special effects, what usually comes to mind are the times when monsters from our nightmares have been pulled into reality – classics like An American Werewolf in London [1981] or The Fly [1986] immediately spring to mind – or illusions showcasing impossible feats have evaporated our disbelief; 1978’s Superman promised “You’ll Believe A Man Can Fly” and damned if that wasn’t the case for this reviewer when he was a child. But there’s also something to be said for the cinematic wizardry that goes into creating effects that replicate the common place as well as the fantastic.

Miniatures have been used in film for as long as people have been making movies – Georges Méliès’1902 silent wonder A Trip to the Moon is one early example – but while I love pint-sized starships, monsters, and alien terrains, I’ve always found miniatures of earthly entities and locations more fascinating simply for the fact that they have the ability to deceive our well-educated eyes in a way the whimsical variety can’t. And in my mind, one of the greatest instances of this is found in John Carpenter’s ground-breaking action-thriller, Escape from New York (1981).

When the effects team over at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures was hired to work on the film, they were faced with the problem of how best to depict the title city. In the film, Manhattan Island has been evacuated and turned into a maximum-security prison where criminals from all over the country are sent to rot. Security walls have been erected on the shores of the area surrounding the island, bridges and tunnels have been collapsed or fitted with landmines, and electricity for the entire penal colony has been shut off. The majority of the film’s action (ex-military war hero turned bank robber Snake Plissken must save the President of the United States after is hijacked and Air Force One crashes) takes place in Manhattan, but the early scenes where we see the shadow-cloaked island from the outside were absolutely essential in setting the scene for Escape’s dystopian premise.

As brothers Dennis and Robert Skotak (Director of Photography of Special VFX and Unit Supervisor/Matte Artist respectively) relate in the making-of mini-documentary Big Trouble in Little Manhattan: The Visual Effects of Escape from New York, the challenges their team encountered were daunting. Flanked on either side by time and budgetary restraints (they had promised to work fast and cheap in order to secure the job from other VFX crews), they first had to figure out whether shooting the real-life Manhattan island was possible.

For fairly obvious reasons, night filming of the location simply couldn’t work. Even if the production could afford to block off vehicle and pedestrian traffic on the streets, lights in the surrounding office buildings couldn’t be extinguished and would stick out like thousands of blazing sore thumbs. Day-for-night shooting (the technique where film shot during the day is darkened to simulate evening) was also kicked around, but this was thankfully given the boot. Finally, the miniature method was settled upon which opened up a whole new can of worms.

Replicating a location as dense as Manhattan would involve an incredible attention to detail. Scale clearly comes into play here but it’s proportion to objects that would later be inserted into certain key shots (like the scenes where we see helicopters flying across the Hudson River towards the island) would need to match up in order to maintain the realism they were striving for. Coupled with this were the challenges of maintaining accuracy in terms of both the location of the buildings on the island as well as their mirroring of their real-world counterparts.

If this were being done today, a quick visit to Google would have provided them with all the reference points they’d need in a matter of minutes. It being the age of analog, however, meant that the crew had to get creative. A street map of the island was photographed, and its negative was projected onto a wall. They then proceeded to outline with black tape the map’s details across a ten-foot by ten-foot grid, ensuring that every structure and street that graced Manhattan was accounted for. This would serve as the base of the eventual miniature city.

With the island’s layout plotted, they now needed to find as many photographs of Manhattan as possible to use as reference points for the myriad of buildings they needed to construct. They painstakingly replicated the structures out of cardboard using a tourism pamphlet for the area. Any aspect of a building that was visible in the pictures was recreated, with the crew going as far as counting each individual floor so that their models would sport the same number of stories seen in real life.

As the famous skyline took shape, the question of how best to fabricate the surrounding Hudson River came next. Once again, a simple but incredibly effective solution was discovered. The team noticed that the concrete ground of the studio they were working in displayed a series of ripples that had hardened into place when the floor was being laid. When the ground got wet, and if seen under the lighting that was being used to simulate a moonlit Manhattan, it looked remarkably like the glistening surface of a body of water, complete with tiny waves. The uncanny effect was so deceptively simple that they actually tried to keep John Carpenter away from the studio so that he wouldn’t see how it was achieved in fear that he might not believe it would work on camera.

The end product of all these moments of MacGyver-like resourcefulness is a miniature city that is the epitome of movie magic. As a teenager I rented this film over and over again from our local video store, and it never occurred to me during those many viewings that what I was seeing on our television screen wasn’t the real Manhattan. When I found out that it was one massive model (I must sheepishly admit that this realization only happened recently when I purchased Scream Factory’s fantastic special edition of Escape) I was absolutely floored and weirdly delighted. Even with today’s brilliant 4K releases, the shots featuring the island from afar still look incredibly real. Part of this is due to the script requiring the city be shrouded in shadow, which certainly worked to the crew’s advantage, but the real credit goes to the special effects masters who worked on the film and their meticulous attention to detail.

There are modern examples of miniatures in some of the blockbusters of recent years – Casino Royale [2006], Inception [2010], and Blade Runner 2049 [2017] are just a few – but the craft is used less and less thanks to the advent of CGI. So it goes. Many other forms of in-camera effects have also gone the way of the dodo, but no matter what side of the fence you find yourself in the great “Digital vs Practical” debate that continues to rage on, we can all agree on the fact that films like Escape from New York stand as a testament to human ingenuity, and, maybe more importantly, serve to remind us of the strange joy that comes with being duped by cinema.

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The legend of the Frogman comes to the screen in the found footage movie Frogman, which joins the Bloody Disgusting-powered SCREAMBOX streaming service tomorrow!

In Frogman, “In the summer of 1999, a 12-year-old named Dallas Kyle captured footage of the mythical Frogman, but no one believed it was real. Twenty years later, Dallas, now an amateur filmmaker struggling to turn his passion into a career, returns to Loveland with friends Amy and Scotty determined to obtain irrefutable proof that the Frogman exists.

“But what starts as an innocent documentary soon turns into a Lovecraftian nightmare as Dallas uncovers the horrific secrets hidden beneath Loveland’s idyllic surface.”

Nathan Tymoshuk, Chelsey Grant, Benny Barrett and Justen Jones star.

Meagan Navarro wrote in her mini-review out of Popcorn Frights 2023, “Director Anthony Cousins takes on the cryptic Frogman via found footage in his feature directorial debut, co-written with John Karsko. In it, a trio of friends embarks on one final filmmaking hoorah before life takes them in separate directions. But in their bid to make one last attempt to capture the elusive cryptid Frogman on camera, they find far more than they ever bargained for.”

“Frogman adheres to the standard found footage blueprint and tropes, drawing heavily from The Blair Witch Project and Willow Creek as the trio starts by interviewing Loveland, Ohio, locals about their town’s cryptid mascot,” Meagan’s review continues. “Friction between the friends gets brought to the surface as they get closer to the truth. While Cousins’ debut doesn’t offer any narrative surprises and makes strange style choices for the camera, it makes up for it with impressive creature effects. The more the humans invade the Frogman’s turf, the more delightfully weird and gnarly things get. It’s an SFX showcase with delightfully deranged mythology that makes this one worth the price of admission.”

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The Tribeca Film Festival is back this week with tons of new genre premieres, retrospectives, and events to get excited about. This year’s festival takes place June 5-16 in New York City, and one of the films headed to the fest is Bloody Disgusting’s AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead.

Slasher cinema gets a candy-coated and raucous new spin as a group of young friends staying at an Airbnb are picked off one by one by a killer whose elaborate murder set pieces are inspired by the seven deadly sins in AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead, which has its World Premiere in Tribeca. Tickets for screenings on June 8, June 10, and June 11 can be found here.

The upcoming slasher film comes courtesy of Saw IV-3D writer and The Collector director Marcus Dunstan, and it’s written by Josh Sims and Jessica Sarah Flaum.

Singer JoJo Siwa stars in the movie and People shared the very first clip from AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead this morning. It prominently features Siwa, and you can watch below.

The cast also includes Jade Pettyjohn, Jennifer Ens, Ali Fumiko Whitney, Michaella Russell, Julian Haig, Justin Derickson, Cardi Wong and Jack Doupe-Smith.

Following the Tribeca premiere, AMFAD hits theaters, Digital and On Demand August 2.

The post ‘AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead’ – First Clip from Horror Movie Starring JoJo Siwa appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.