Eighties Stew.

Hello all! I am back with another VHS Friday. This next one on the pile was a title I'd been meaning to get to for a while - Bert L. Dragin's 1988 “sort-of” haunted house flick Twice Dead. Even though I had seen Dragin's other two efforts Summer Camp Nightmare & Suburbia in my youth I missed out on this one. It's a hell of a coverbox and not entirely misleading, as that character does bust out of a mirror, just not in the Die Hard way this picture below would insinuate.

A family moves in to an old mansion that happens to be haunted by Depression-era showbiz star.

Twice Dead is kind of a weird title in that it doesn't really refer to a character as much as the two different plots going on in this movie. Initially, the paranormal aspect is front facing, but it keeps taking a back seat to this secondary storyline about the two siblings Scott (Tom Bresnahan, of The Brain!) and Robin (Jill Whitlow who'll always be my Weird Science perfume counter girl) fighting off neighbourhood punks. It's not only until the climax that these two stories fully intersect.

Though both of these plots are fairly standard, this movie is populated with a ton of welcome faces. The aforementioned Bresnahan is as delightfully snarky and happy-go-lucky as he was in The Brain which put a smile on my face. He must have shot these two movies back-to-back and I wonder if he was aware of the similarities, playing a character who doubly likes pranks, is attacked by tentacles/spectral ropes and finds himself in a car chase. Jill Whitlow is lovely in this, and it was no surprise to me find out that her and Bresnahan were dating during filming. They played siblings here, but some of those bedside scenes had a tension that was a négligée photo shoot away from being Amityville 2.

Jill Whitlow and Tom Bresnahan in Twice Dead.

Also in the cast was Brooke Bundy (Kristin's mom from Nightmare 3), Todd Bridges as the doomed friend and much to the elation of my seventeen-year-old self, Charlie Spradling. A much welcome appearance, even if it was only to rock a jean jacket with no shirt, get nude and then promptly die by STE (Sexually Transmitted Electrocution). What an angel! Oh, and completely unrelated, this movie has a cat named Meow - which of course has Robin walking around calling out “Meow?” - that saw an unnecessarily brutal end. :(

J.C. + C.S.

Other than that, it is just filler between altercations with the aforementioned goons. The house is pretty cool and outfitted with some nooks and crannies (the dumbwaiter specifically being built for the movie) for our bodies to aimlessly search. Twice Dead is another one of those movies that seems to have trouble ending itself, not necessarily because they wanted to do another one, but perhaps there were a few cooks in the kitchen.

Anyway, I was glad to knock this one off and the trio of Bresnahan, Whitlow and Spradling kept me entertained throughout.