loomis78-815-989034 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?

BadlandZ No spoilers here, just basics.The acting was fair to OK. The story/script was fair/OK (interesting, but maybe a little to detailed and over-thought, which COULD be OK or great).But the direction and production of this just blew any "watchability" elements apart. What was reoccurring themes got lost in the convoluted mishmash of the director over emphasizing things that didn't matter, and letting things that do matter just slip right past. Then throwing in totally unneeded special effects that added nothing, and actually detracted from the ability to get into the story. On and on and on, ever 10 minutes part of me went "ok, I get why the actor played it that way, but why did they shoot the scene like that, and edit it that way, it might has well of been a live play on stage..."If you can see past the horrible production of this movie, there is some decent acting and an interesting story underneath. But, to be honest, it's SO difficult to see because of the horrible production, I couldn't recommend ANYONE try to watch this movie (unless you are only doing so to get horror movie story ideas and see if the actors in it are any good).

TheLittleSongbird 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

Paul Curtis Tuesday afternoon I went to see #holdyourbreath at a theater in Times Square! Since most of their productions go the straight-to-DVD or Video-on-demand route, I was tickled to see an Asylum picture in a movie house during the first week of its release! Asylum's strategy is to use a numeral or an early letter of the alphabet, when choosing a movie title...in this case, the "#" sign. The strategy worked insofar as the movie DOES come to the top of the list of films...but the ticket lady didn't recognize what movie I was talking about, when I asked for it. "Oh! The first one on the list!" she said after an embarrassed pause.The movie opens unpromisingly with (apparently) 16mm stock footage of the night sky, but soon launches into a nice gruesome prologue set in the 1950's, depicting the execution of a crazed mass-murderer. The sequence was lively and gory, and left a good impression that worse sights would soon follow. The rest of the film takes place in present-day California, where six former high school pals embark on a camping trip, hoping to catch up on old times and abandon their day-to-day stresses. When the road to the camp ground carries them past a graveyard, one of the pals insists that taking a breath while driving past a graveyard, risks possession by disembodied spirits. Of course, this happens almost immediately, so we spend much of the remainder of the film watching the cast assume alternate personalities and run around torturing/shooting at each other. Sounds like fast-moving craziness would ensue, however the movie rarely evokes the same breathless "what's gonna happen next?" anarchy of its first ten minutes.Oddest aspect of the film is not the "possessed" versions of the protagonists, but their everyday personalities. Example: soon after the friends see the graveyard, they stop their vehicle and one of them announces that he intends to relieve his bladder. He then walks a few steps away from the others and proceeds to do as he has announced, without making any effort to step out of their line-of-sight. The behavior isn't manic or unhinged, but it shows him as a creep. And they're all people with whom I wouldn't want to spend many idle hours.In a long sequence set in the now-abandoned building where the murderer was electrocuted, (located conveniently close to the cemetery) the protagonists roam needlessly, get romantic, play pranks, and then leave. What's remarkable about the sequence is: they trespass into an abandoned sanitarium...locate its morgue and its execution chamber (!!!)...and then hang around for a while instead of getting the heck OUT. What kind of people break into a fifty-years-abandoned morgue and instead of saying "Eww!" think, "hey, let's make whoopee on this gritty, dusty morgue table!" Or play at strapping each other in the electric chair? It's not unimaginable, yet plainly these are not ordinary 20-somethings. And the scriptwriter NEVER pursues this aspect: we meet a bunch of semi-twisted people in a supernatural situation, and yet the rest of the plot never refers back to their distinctly oddball behavior. The beginning and the scenes in the sanitarium/prison got my hopes up, then fell into a standard spooky-movie path.Also, when the disembodied killer possesses a living person, he uses the host's knowledge (such as: what is a cell phone), but when he leaves the body, only fragmented, nightmarish images remain. I found the idea of surviving the possession, (and having no recollection of the mischief committed) to be disquieting, so I was sorry the movie didn't explore it further. I hope there will be a commentary track on the disc release; I'd like to hear more about what the writer intended.Apart from that disappointment? I enjoyed the film. Asylum demonstrates its mastery of squeezing the full value of every nickel spent on production, right up onto the screen. The original score by Chris Ridenhour was nice, if not his best and the practical makeup was convincing. The CGI violence and spook effects were OK (people love to complain about Asylum's decisions in using CGI) and were certainly NOT the downfall of this production. I've noticed that many people who slam Asylum productions, preface their reviews with "Normally I love Bad Movies, but THIS...!" ...and then fume about some aspect they didn't like. In my experience, Bad Movie fans are looking for one (or all) of the following values: inept production, unrestrained creative content, or over-the-top campy performances; Asylum productions routinely under-deliver in all three areas because the creative team works so hard to make competent, professional-looking entertainment. Ironically, some movie watchers think the results look cheap and unconvincing, while the low-budget movie aficionados find the results flat and unexciting.My reaction to the cast is problematical, since it's clear I have pegged the protagonists as a bunch of creeps. Standout performances came from Seth Cassell as the guy who smokes his pipe in the car, Steve Hanks as a guy who likes to offer coffee to people whilst threatening them, and Katrina Bowden as a pretty gal who's not as likable as when she was in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil" (but that really does set an unreasonable standard.) Jordan Pratt-Thatcher was memorable in the opening scene (wish there had been more of him.) Asylum regular Gerald Webb has an appealing scene as a well-meaning park ranger. Cassell's performance was the one that left me thinking, "that guy can ACT!" Again, not to dismiss Asylum's marketing, but it seemed ill-considered to put a hash-tag in the title of a story in which the internet is irrelevant. In fact no plot element is more modern than the automobile or the electric chair. If you're going to create an old-timey spook story, the decision to give it a Twitter-era title is misleading. Strange, since the flick has more to offer than trendiness.