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.
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