Bons baisers de l'au-delà

This movie was definitely cheesy. I saw this movie a long, long, long time ago on cable television. I enjoyed the movie because I was a child watching a rated R movie. It was a typical B-rated movie with blood and gore and sex and drugs and violence. You know, the essence of the 80's.

The Cates family inherited an old mansion in Beverly Hills from their late uncle Tyler Walker, who was a well-known stage actor. When they get there, they find the rundown place to be overrun by some street punks who want nothing but trouble. After the Cates' teenagers make fools of those punks, they want to make their lives living hell. But also their uncle Tyler's spirit still hangs around the house, and doesn't seems to like the street punks' intrusion.

Roger Corman's Concorde churns out an uneven, but well intended low-rent b-horror film that stage an entertainingly weird mixture, where it has the story criss-crossing into campy fields of supernatural and revenge, and then finally combining the two. Everything about it is stereotypical with the usual shenanigans, but director Bert Dragin does a well enough job with his pacing and makes the twisty style unpredictable and always engaging. Limitations don't hold it back, as the competent make-up and special f/x generates some creative and effective moments. It slowly builds itself up, for a crackerjack closing half. Some demented scenes towards the end, are well worth the attention. Sure the technical side of the production might not be perfect (with the boom mike constantly becoming visible), but it was surefooted. Zoran Hochstatter's murky camera-work sometimes had a neat frenetic touch and dreary colour use, and David Bergeaud's simmering music score stewed up some spooky cues to add to the atmospheric urban setting of the grand looking mansion. The gimmicky screenplay by Bert Dragin and Robert McDonnell seems to work, but if you don't take it for what it is. The ludicrous, and somewhat illogical and loose nature might be hard to shake. Also its change in moods, from being broodingly dark to suddenly comically light might be an inconsistent turn off. The script feels one-note for most part, but weaves in some amusing flourishes of dark humour; jaw-dropping dialogues and an oddly unforeseeable twist here and there. The performances are well suited and come across fair. Tom Bresnahan and Jill Whitlow are likable as the siblings. Christopher Burgard chews it up as smarmy gang leader and Todd Bridges shows up in a little part.

Junky entertainment, but I wasn't expecting the modest quality that it dished up. Fans of low-budget horror should give it a try.

One of the better examples of the 80's on how to mix the horror and comedy genres successfully. This film is about a family moving into a house that is haunted by the ghost of a once great actor. A few neighborhood punks cause trouble though and eventually try to take the house over and kill the family, but the ghost helps them out and dispatches of the punks in violent and creative ways.

Very low budgeted, but fast paced thriller with only average to poor performances and ok direction. It is extremely entertaining though with some very good f/x and an especially exciting finale.

Rated R; Graphic Violence, Nudity, Sexual Situations, and Profanity.

You have to like a movie that has a good plot, this is one of them but very confusing. Not bad considering it was one of many 1980's, direct-to-video, shown late at night on Cinemax, horror flicks. It starts out in the early 1930's and actor Tyler Walker dancing with a woman who is stiff as a board, then three men(one in a fur coat) come by to get Tyler out of his home. THe next thing you see is Tyler stabbing his dance partner that turns out to be a mannequin, then he hangs himself. Fast Forward to the present where a family of four moves into the house. Turns out the fur-coat guy became the new owner of the home that fateful night, then turned it into a funeral parlor and it was then left to a relative and his family. The family is forced to move in after going bankrupt in Colorado. But upon arrival they're greeted by a gang who use the place as a hangout. One gang member "Crypt" seems to act very weird, talking in a slow, low voice and pre-occupied with the family daughter Robin. Of course, the usual ensues where the son Scott hears bumps in the night, then the family is tormented by the bikers, Robin and Scott get back at them, then the gang returns to get revenge. All comes to a very quick conclusion, with the help of Tyler's ghost, who can be seen in the mirror. The ghost helps kill the bikers except for one, who re-creates Tyler's fateful night back in the 30's with Robin. In the end, instead of Tyler's ghost in the mirror, it's Crypt since he hung himself too. By the movie's end we learn that Tyler and his dance partner/co-star Myrna were in love.They had a love child, Tyler left the home to Myrna but she ended up marrying the fur coat guy who is the family's great uncle. Myrna bares a striking resemblance to her niece, Robin.

Now for the confusing parts: 1) We see Tyler in the beginning, dancing with a real woman then in the next shot it's a mannequin. Are we getting a peek into his depravity or is it all part of a hoax on the filmmaker's to make us think we see a woman? If the later, then why? 2) Tyler tries to kill Scott by wrapping a noose around his neck. Then it's only when the biker's grab Robin that Tyler shakes the bed to wake Scott up. Why did Tyler go from scaring the brother to helping him? It's obviously because Robin reminds Tyler of his former love, but why go through that one scene of scaring the son, to me it was unnecessary to the plot. 3)The fur coat guy had the deed to the home in the beginning of the film, yet we learn Tyler left it to his love and she had died in 1987 in a sanitarium. Who left the house to the family? Fur coat guy or Myrna? Maybe she signed it over to her husband? 4)Tyler is seen stabbing a mannequin in the beginning and even appears in Robin's mirror looking like he wants to stab her, yet he never hurt her or his first love. Why the stabbing set up? Is it to show that he was so angry with her new marriage that he acted out his anger on a dummy but never hurt her? That's fine, but why show him in Robin's mirror with a knife if he wants to protect her? 5) Crypt, we learn is Tyler and Myrna's grandson, who relives his grandad's last night. We even see Crypt trying to stab Robin but Tyler retract's the knife. Did Tyler know this was his relative? Is that why Crypt was spared? and why was Crypt so intent on killing Robin when his grandfather didn't kill Myrna? AGain, if anything, Tyler was trying to protect Robin from any harm. Tyler was nuts, but not violent and it's obvious his love Myrna spent her last years in an institution. Maybe this made Crypt's dad twice as unstable? 6)Crypt is haunting the place at the end, what happened to Tyler and why is he letting Crypt try to attack the girl?(at the end Robin has a dream that Crypt tried to stab her and when she wakes up, she doesn't notice but there's a knife in her pillow). 7)Robin and Scott, at one point, lure the biker's in the house and knock them out one at a time then. After one his knocked out, Scott and Robin make it look like the gang member was murdered by the ghost so that the other gang members would run away. The next day, Robin and Scott drop the gang members off in different areas yet we never see how they got Crypt down and what they did with him.

Great movie if you can find it on ebay

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.