Twice Dead (1988)

Movie Info

Ghost?

Scott Cates (Tom Bresnahan) and Robin Cates (Jill Whitlow) have just moved into a new home inherited from their relative.  Unfortunately, the home was the site of the suicide of the actor Tyler Walker (Jonathan Chapin) and now is considered haunted by the neighborhood.  When Scott, Robin, and their parents arrive, they find a biker gang led by Silk (Christopher Burgard) has taken up in the house and aren’t willing to give it up without a fight.  When Scott and Robin’s parents are forced to leave them for business out of state, Scott and Robin find that the home’s possession might be their only hope when Silk and his gang comes calling.

Those punks killed a fake cat!!!

Directed by Bert L. Dragin, Twice Dead is a horror film based around a haunted house and possession.  The B-Movie had a small release and is generally found packaged under the Roger Corman’s Cult Classics Double Feature series of DVDs and packaged with The Evil from 1978.

It must immediately be repeated that this is a B-Movie and it lives up to the B-Movie moniker.  The movie struggles to find a direction and the direction it finds isn’t very good.

The movie is set-up as a ghost story…or is it a possession story…or is it zombie bikers?  It is all three and none of them get the proper development.  The movie also has a weird relationship between Scott and his sister Robin which almost feels incestuous.  Add to that totally absent parents that tell their son he needs to learn to shoot a gun to protect his sister and you have a weird (and bad) blend.

You better pick up a gun to defend your sister, boy!

Don’t expect much out of the acting for Twice Dead as well.  It is rather weak cast with poor acting on all fronts.  I sometimes feel bad for being hard on a cast when a script is also bad, but if Twice Dead’s script had been better, I don’t think it would have changed anything.  You do get Todd Bridges in a small role that does not go anywhere.

The movie’s special effects are totally ’80s and bad ’80s.  The ghost/zombies look weak and for a movie that needs to be built on scares, there are none.  Like many horror films from this period there are fun dated biker punks that are a bit amusing.  I would have had more respect for the movie if it was just loaded down with nudity and killers chopping up victims…I would have welcomed the gore.

This movie just feels like a neutered story that was pumped out to try to make a quick buck from the video market.  With the big video boom in the ’80s movies like Twice Dead had a chance to explode, but Twice Dead wasn’t one of those cases.  I’m sure that the film did make some money due to sales to stores, but overall Twice Dead should have been DOA.