Directed by Jared Cohn. Written by Geoff Meed and Kenny Zinn. Starring Katrina Bowden, Randy Wayne, Keith Allan, Erin Marie Hogan, Steve Hanks, Seth Cassell and Darin Cooper.
Plot: a group of friends start getting picked off after one of them refuses to hold their breath while driving past a graveyard.
We were excited to watch this because we grew up on the whole holding your breath myth. We thought they’d be able to do something really cool with it. But we were wrong. Someone else needs to try to do something with this plotline because the people who made this totally missed the mark.
The movie opens with a serial killer, Van Hausen (Allan), being executed. Before they actually kill him though, he kills the warden, Wilkes (Cooper). Unrealistically, they go through with the execution anyway. Later, seven friends are driving past a cemetary when Jerry (Bowden) screams for everyone to hold their breath. She knows the urban legend about evil spirits being able to possess you if you’re not holding your breath. Of course, one of her friends, Kyle (Cassell), is to busy smoking pot to hold his breath and he is possessed by Van Hausen’s spirit.
Van Hausen can then kill anyone he wants to, anyway he wants to, even if it is pathetically nonsensical. You can’t cut someone in half that way and you can’t kill someone with an electric mixer to the face. Sometimes death scenes aren’t completely feasible, but in good movies it doesn’t matter. This was not a good movie, so it mattered. The rules were made up as the movie went along. For example, the myth insinuates that only bad spirits possess people, but eventually the warden possesses someone even though he was a good guy.
******SPOILER ALERT******
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Van Hausen has the ability to jump from person to person, which is a lousy rule to begin with. Then, the friends come across the cemetary’s caretaker, McBride (Hanks), who convinces them that Warden Wilkes’s spirit could fight Van Hausen’s spirit on the astral plane. And that’s what happens. Two ghosts start to fight each other. The special effects are horrid though and the “fight scene” is therefore, hilarious. The ghosts kind of looked like Casper, to be honest. In the end, McBride allows both spirits to possess him and somehow that causes an explosion, but it doesn’t end there. Jerry, Johnny (Wayne) and Natasha (Hogan) make it back to their campsite where it is revealed that Johnny is now possessed by Van Hausen. And he kills the girls as the scene fades.
This is a nice movie if you want to laugh your ass off, but it’s not worth anything else. The dialogue is particularly ridiculous. Except for McBride’s. He has some very classic words of wisdom and is clearly the best thing about the production. There’s also some outstanding gratuitous boob shots, but nothing else to recommend a viewing.
My score: 27. DJ’s score: 38.
“Are you paying someone to help you misunderstand me?”
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