Twice Dead starts in the 1930's as stage actor Tyler Walker (Jonathan Chapin) is having a hard time, firstly he's skint & to add insult to injury his large Beverly Hills house is about to be taken away from him by Harry Cates Sr. (Bob McLean) the man who stole his one true love off him. It's all too much for poor Tyler & he is found dead having hanged himself... Jump to the late 80's & Harry Cates Jr. (Sam Melville) has inherited the house from his uncle, in an uncanny resemblance to past events Harry is also dead skint so decides to move his family into the house to ease their financial burden. Unfortunately when they turn up they find a local gang of punks have decided the front garden is theirs, after a stand off involving the police the gang moves on. Scott (Tom Bresnahan) & his sister Robin (Jill Whitlow) have an ugly encounter the gang at school & a feud begins to develop. The gang, lead by Silk (Christopher Burgard),lie in wait for Robin & one of them tries to rape her but Scott saves the day. Silk & the rest of the gang are really annoyed now & decide to have their revenge by breaking into the Cates house but a supernatural presence lurks that start to kill the intruders off one-by-one...

Co-written & directed by Bert L. Dragin I thought Twice Dead was a pretty decent film & much better than I had any right to expect. The script by Dragin & Robert McDonnell moves along at a reasonable pace & provides a fair amount of mindless entertainment. It mixes revenge film with a little bit of a ghost story & finally adds a touch of teenage slasher film to round things off, for the most part it works quite well as it's balanced & no one single theme overly dominates the running time. The character's aren't as clichéd as one may expect, apart from the stereotypical punk gang consisting of leather wearing, flick knife wielding, motorbike riding tough guys sporting bad attitudes wherever they go. There is a great twist about halfway through that I must admit I didn't see coming & succeeded in surprising me which isn't easy after you've seen as many of these low budget horror films as I have. No explanation is given as to why Tyler is a ghost, don't people commit suicide all the time? Do they all come back as vengeful spirits? I don't think so. The place is haunted by Tyler & thats it we have to accept it. The ending & various events throughout the film seems to indicate that history is repeating itself including something about a coffin in the basement but these plot threads are never really tied together that well & it comes across as a bit of an afterthought.

Made by the Roger Corman owned Concorde Pictures Twice Dead was director Dragin's second & to this point in time last film which seems a bit of a shame because he turns in a throughly decent & credible horror film, it has that late 80's look & feel while it also has a nice atmosphere to it as he films everything with minimal use of colour. There is even a nice little car chase in here as well. I could have done with a bit more blood & gore but what we get is OK, there are a few decapitated heads, a squashed head, death by motorcycle, a couple electrocuted while having sex & someone shooting themselves with a shotgun.

Now, one thing I have to mention is the boom mike. I have never seen a film where the boom mike is in shot as many times as it is in Twice Dead, I was thinking that it should get some sort of recognition in the credits as it has more screen time in the film than some of the character's! I counted at least six times when it was painfully visible, all in wide shots. Other than that Twice Dead is generally well made with decent production values. The acting was OK as well.

Twice Dead was a bit of a pleasant surprise as I didn't think I would but I liked it. If your a fan of these types of low budget horror films then you could do a hell of a lot worse than this, personally I think it's well worth checking out if you lay your hands on a copy.

I had the chance to get to sit down to watch the 1988 movie "Twice Dead" for the very first time here in 2021, just 33 years after the movie was released. I hadn't heard about it prior to watching it, so I didn't know what I was in for here, aside from it being a late 1980s horror movie.

And boy was it a late 1980s horror movie in every meaning of that phrase. This movie was so stereotypical for a horror movie from the end of the 1980s in every way. But hey, if you enjoy the movies back then, then you should feel right at home when you sit down to watch "Twice Dead" from writers Bert L. Dragin and Robert McDonnell.

The storyline told in "Twice Dead" was pretty straight forward, sort of thing "Return of the Living Dead", except you exchange the zombies with a vengeful ghost, and replace the cemetery and factory with an old, run-down mansion. Then you have a delinquent band of miscreants hellbent on wrecking havoc upon the new youngsters that just moved into town.

Visually then the movie was definitely a late 1980s product, and the passing of time has not been overly kind to the effects in the movie. I am sure that back in 1988s then the effects here were adequate, but today, well, not so much.

The acting in "Twice Dead" was adequate.

My rating of this stereotypical late 1980s horror movie settles on a mediocre five out of ten stars, as the movie doesn't really bring anything to the horror genre that hadn't been done already back in the day, and more often than not, done better even.

A family moves into a rundown mansion located in a dangerous urban neighborhood. Teenage son Scott (a solid and likable performance by Tom Bresnahan) and his spunky sister Robin (a winningly perky portrayal by the adorable Jill Whitlow of "Night of the Creeps" fame) are terrorized by a nasty gang of no-count street punks. Fortunately, the ghost of a famous Hollywood actor who hung himself in the house back in the 30's materializes so he can help Scott and Robin bump off said nasty punks. Director/co-writer Bert Dragin whips up a truly odd and campy curio that clumsily mixes elements of street gang juvenile delinquent exploitation movies and standard spooky haunted house fright fare with genuinely ludicrous, but still entertaining and often (unintentionally?) hilarious results: The street gang butchers the family cat and attempt to rape Robin, but our intrepid family decides to stick it out anyway, the parents leave the kids to fend for themselves when they go away to tend to family business, and Scott and Robin stage a fake gruesome bloodbath in an attempt to scare the hoodlums off (!). The whole thing concludes with an inevitable last reel massacre, with the gloriously absurd, yet grisly highlights being a fat jerk getting killed by his own motorcycle and a libidinous couple getting electrocuted while in the middle of doing just what you think. The cast struggle gamely with the patently inane material: Breznahan and Whitlow make for appealing leads, Sam Melville and Brooke Bundy do credible work as the parents, Christopher Burgard sneers it up with aplomb as mean gang leader Silk, Jonathan Chapin is suitably creepy as vicious gang member Crip, and Todd Bridges contributes an appealing turn as nice guy Pete. Busty brunette knockout Charlie Spradling pops her top and bares her beautifully bountiful breasts as horny moll Tina. Zoran Hockstatter's reasonably polished cinematography and David Bergaurd's generic ooga-booga shivery score both do the trick. A perfectly mindless diversion.