Hold Your Breath

In the intro a guy is about to be executed by electric chair in a hospital for the criminally insane in the 50s. For a moment he frees himself, kills some guards, and recited religious warnings to the witnesses. But he's caught again and executed.

Back in our time, 7 kids go for a road trip to camp. When they drive past a cemetery one of the girls screams out that they have to hold their breath, because as legend has it, spirits of bad people could roam around cemeteries and could possess you if you don't hold your breath. They all do except one of the guys who's too busy smoking pot all the time.

When they make a pitstop they discover the abandoned hospital nearby and go to investigate, except dope-head who is indeed possessed by the spirit of our villain from the intro. He kills a cop and acts like a jerk toward his friends.

Eventually they make it to camp, but the evil spirit jumps to another guy and he drives back to cemetery with one of the girls, whom, he kills gruesomely. When the rest of the kids go looking for them they run into an old cranky hospital guard who knows exactly what is going on and wants to put an end to it.

I haven't seen an Asylum horror movie in a long time. Things have changed quite a bit. The movie looks good, except during the night when all the actors have some glow in their eyes. The acting is very good by the entire cast. Unfortunately, the script is a bit unfinished. Direction and editing are amateurish. One wonders whether some of the mistakes are on purpose, that's how silly they are. But the cast is attractive, the girls are gorgeous, there's some nudity, some gore, however some of the special effects look like they came from an 80s movie. Overall, a botched B movie saved by the charismatic cast.

Guy has tree trunk shoved through eye and brain.... "You OK Son? ... Hang in there"... I think that sums this movie up completely.

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).

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, 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.