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
