Hold Your Breath (2012)

A group of twenty something friends and couples head to the mountains for some fun. When they approach a graveyard they're going to pass Jerry (Bowden) tells everyone to hold their breath so no spirits can enter them and possess them. Supposedly based on an urban legend know one including the audience has ever heard of. Of course pothead Kyle (Seth Cassell) inhales his smoke along with the spirit of Van Hausen (Keith Allen) a notorious serial killer executed at a nearby prison and buried in the cemetery. Before you can scream "lousy digital effects" Kyle is possessed and slaughters a cop who stops by to help when no one else is around. This spirit can hop into other bodies which it does multiple times while picking off members of the group along the way. This tedious film has terrible characters, lousy dialog and even worse digital effects. With almost no practical make up effects at all, the filmmakers put their trust in digital effects and fail miserably. The digital blood (and there is a lot of it) splashes around like you were watching a cartoon. The characters whine back and forth making any audience member over the age of 25 want to see them all die. The cast is good looking and try to make this believable but it is so poorly written nothing could save it. Once again, I don't have to mention there isn't a scare in sight. Do I?

Asylum produces some nice films that are low budget and almost spoof like in a way. When I rent a movie by them, I pretty much know what I'm getting. When I come here and read the reviews by people who didn't like it, it makes me wonder why they even rented it in the first place. Titanic and Gone With the Wind this is not. You have a micro- budgeted horror film about a spirit that possesses you if you don't hold your breath while driving by a graveyard. Shouldn't that be a hint for you?Hold Your Breath is one of the better straight to video horror films I've seen. It doesn't do everything right but it does a lot more right than wrong. To start off, the rapport between the actors playing the college kids is really nicely done. The cast and the set up reminded me a bit of Friday the 13th Part 3 or 4. You had the dating couple, the stoner, the hot single chick and a couple of others tossed in. The script, written by Geoff Meed (who is more known as a B actor) sets it all up nicely to begin. These young adults are off to a weekend getaway and the guy who organized insists on no cell phones for the weekend. Just a cool weekend of camping and being at one with nature. Back in the 50's a mass murderer/rapist/religious loonie was put to death in an electric chair. His spirit lives on as it is too malicious to even be accepted in Hell. The spirit can pass into different people as it chooses to and those people become possessed by the killer.Yes, the story has been done before and it has kind of been done better in some movies. But what this one has going for it is some great old school Tom Savini/Rick Baker like makeup effects and the set design is fantastic. Night time is lit ominously by the moon, graveyards have fog drifting by the tombstones and the sanitarium where the execution took place is creepy and vast and claustrophobic all at the same time. There are some great effects as well highlighted by a girl being tied to a tree and getting cut in two by barbed wire. I like effects like this, they remind of the older films like The Howling and Friday the 13th. The Saw films are good and the gore is well done but you can see where the CGI takes over. Sometimes good old fashioned prosthetics and make-up is just better.Katrina Bowden and Randy Wayne are the two best characters and they do quite well here. The rest of the cast is fine as well. Bowden is almost too gorgeous and they have her running around in Daisy Dukes and a flimsy shirt all throughout the film, which of course is apropos for a horror film.I would have given the film even higher marks if it weren't for some silly and unnecessary plot pieces, like two characters running away scared from another when she is but a 110 pound woman. That just seemed strange. And I didn't care for the ending. But all in all, it was a good effort.7/10

The Asylum have made some tolerable movies, but a vast majority of their work, especially those from the disaster movie genre, is terrible. Hold Your Breath is far from their worst and is redeemable, but at the same time it is generally a poor movie. It does have a pretty effective opening sequence, a couple of inventive deaths, the beautiful Katrina Bowden giving a quite intense performance, Steve Hanks stealing every scene he's in and the hilarious line "You look as confused as a baby in a titty bar!". For me though, that's all there is to Hold Your Breath. The rest of the actors don't distinguish themselves and come across as bland and awkward. Actually Seth Cassell isn't so bad, he does have some acting talent but it is a talent that is not used very well at all in the movie because like all the actors he has little to work with. The actors do struggle with very cookie-cutter and severely underdeveloped characters and also a clunky script- that throws things in and leaves them unexplained often. McBride has the best lines easily, though I was never sure whether they were supposed to be taken seriously or for comedy. Excusing that the story is very derivative, with an idea that has been done to death already, the telling of it is very by-the-numbers, even some of the inventive deaths are not enough to disguise lazy exposition, really bad pedestrian pacing(especially after the prologue until McBride is introduced) or a distractingly goofy final act(like I was watching a different movie all of a sudden). The villain is not very memorable or menacing either. The direction and editing are amateurish at best, and the music doesn't gel with the atmosphere, some of the songs even sounded like bad, forgettable knock-offs of Evanescence. All in all, a poor movie but the Asylum has done worse than this. 4/10 Bethany Cox

This movie is the stupidest movie I have ever watched... Waste of 2 hours of my life...Serious waste of money... If you have any mind... do not watch this movie... Awful Awful AWFUL... I hated every minute of it... the effects sucked and it was just stupid... They made up scenes that NEVER FRICKING happened... I watched the whole thing to see if it got any better but it didn't... it sucked... the whole movie sucked... I would never tell anyone to watch this movie ever... the preview looked good but the movie was horrible... it was just straight horrible... I am so mad that I watched this movie... I don't know who would ever come up with a movie so stupid... I am so disappointed... I seriously thought this movie was going to be good but it wasn't... it was dumb... Even though this movie was so dumb I will still always hold my breath going past or through a cemetery and I will never use an egg beater ever again....