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.

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

Total waste of my time if I could get my money back for renting this movie I would but acting was horrible plot was stupid and not to mention the fake animated fire, and dude that helped them towards the end of the movie said he didn't have a car but when he let them escape somehow he pops up with a Toyota, than when there leaving driving down the road kept switching back and forth between the Toyota they escaped with and the Chevy they went to the camp grounds in, like every 5 secs they were playing Chinese fire drill, oh and one more thing the egg beater part when the chick took out dude eye, a 2 year old could have seen the egg beater was like 5 inches away from dudes eye and you can tell that when she left and he's laying on the floor you can obviously tell it was a plastic prop or something on his eye, the movie was just altogether terrible and the director either shouldn't have even made this movie or did one hell of a better job instead of half assen it, please for the love of god do not try to make a sequel and if you do, have someone else direct it because this movie was terrible and awful and a waste of money