Hold Your Breath

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source: Hold Your Breath

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?

Director Jared Cohn delivers high octane suspense and horror with this gem from Asylum Pictures. Starring a cast of exciting fresh faces with talent to burn, the film has a superior script and production values far beyond the usual horror fare. Veteran actor Hanks is a real standout and gives a superb performance that is both sinister and fascinating. The plot is one of the creepiest imaginable and will keep you glued to your seat until the movie's shattering climax. I would count on seeing these young actors in major Hollywood productions very, very soon. Rarely does a cast of newcomers make the profound impact this one does with a first motion picture outing.

There is an old wives' tale that you should hold your breath when passing by a cemetery lest an evil spirit rejected by both heaven and hell gets inside of you when you inhale. Someone in a carload of college kids on holiday doesn't hold his/her breath when driving by a graveyard. This allows the spirit of an executed serial killer to get inside him/her to begin a spree of body- jumping carnage. Oy horrible. I never heard this tale before. And I hope I don't again. The film starts off horribly unbelievably. Then it cuts to present time but the film is horrible.

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

This movie, like a number of horrors of its kind, are better when you're younger. Once you get older and realize you bought the movie a few years ago and decide to re-watch it, you be like why did I buy this. With that said, it's something about corny horror movies that I like and this one is no different. When that police car blew up though, I was rolling, the effects were so bad. Acting could have been better and some of the dialogue needed to be revised. I'm not gonna say don't watch it or you should, but it is a little entertaining and probably is something for the horror collection.