Kris Kristofferson cheated death as Whistler in "Blade II," New Line, 2002

"We Take It Back - He Never Died In The First Place!"
Kris Kristofferson in "Blade II"

Kris Kristofferson's resurrection in "Blade II" was fishy even by the standards of a vampire movie. Here's an entire genre predicated on the notion of life after death, and they still had to bend over backwards for another go around with Kristofferson. After an attack by vampires in the first "Blade," Kristofferson's Whistler is left for dead. Rather than become a bloodsucker, he kills himself with Blade's gun. But when screenwriter David S. Goyer and director Guillermo del Toro needed Kristofferson for "Blade II," they had to hatch a scheme to bring the character back. Y'see, you never actually saw Whistler kill himself; Blade hands him his gun, turns his back, and walks away. We hear the gunshot, but all we see of Whistler is his hand falling to his side and the gun slipping from his fingers.

Now, one might assume that a man shooting himself in the head at point blank range would not miss, and that a human/vampire hybrid with enhanced senses could tell whether or not his friend was dead even if he was facing away at the time. But one would be wrong. Evidently, Blade was spacing out so badly he totally missed the fact that Whistler wasn't dead. (Somehow, he also missed the part where vampires kidnapped Whistler's body, too. Some superhero.) Bringing Blade's mentor back in the sequel as a vampire would have made for an interesting twist that also emphasized the cruel nature of Blade's existence. Instead, Goyer and del Toro pushed the suspension of disbelief to the breaking point to negate the character's death. It didn't last though; Whistler died again in "Blade Trinity." Maybe.

See also: Robert Wagner was burnt to a crisp in "Austin Powers," but was doing fine with minimal scarring in "The Spy Who Shagged Me."

How do you follow up a movie about a race of immortals that ends with them all killing each other? The right answer is: You don't. The wrong answer is: You make "Highlander 2: The Quickening." The first "Highlander" carefully established a fundamental set of rules for these immortals and their decapitational combat. Carefully and systematically, "The Quickening" dismantles and disregards those rules. No matter which version of the sequel you watch, the original theatrical cut or the allegedly superior "Renegade Version," the whole concept is rendered retroactively incomprehensible, even to the people onscreen. Co-star Virginia Madsen tries to lay it out for us, but even she seems unsure: "You're mortal there," she says hesitantly. "But you're immortal here until you kill all the guys from there who've come here, and then you're mortal here. Unless you go back there or some more guys from there come here, in which case you become immortal here...again." "Something like that," laughs Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert).

The presence of Sean Connery only makes it worse. His Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez unquestionably bit it in the first film. But in numero dos, Connery appears in a flashback on the alien planet Zeist (or on Earth many eons ago because, y'know, it used to look like an alien planet) where he tells Lambert, "We are joined in a way that can never be broken, not even by death. When you need me, you'll only have to call my name." And when MacLeod does, Ramírez reappears, good as new. He dies a second time, so why doesn't MacLeod bring him back again? Yet another flaw in a movie full of them. The series should have taken a cue from its own tagline: there should have been only one.

See also: "Jaws: The Revenge," wherein an inexplicably persistent shark takes revenge on the family that has killed it three previous times.

[Additional photos: Jack Palance and Billy Crystal in "City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold," Columbia Pictures, 1994; Sigourney Weaver in "Alien: Resurrection," 20th Century Fox, 1997; Leonard Nimoy in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Paramount, 1984; Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert in "Highlander II: The Quickening," Interstar, 1991]

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Bald Melon

What about that shark that kept coming back in three (count 'em THREE) sequels in all those Jaws movies!
(I know it was supposed to be a different shark each time, but when the same family keeps getting harassed by a 30 ft great white, higher forces are at work.

Jeremy

This is cheating since its a book, but Ian Malcolm in The Lost World. They say hes dead at the end of Jurassic Park and then open the Lost World with him claiming the doctors were wrong. I'd complain, but it was a good book so screw it.