While I was in the Best Death thread, I thought about True Romance, where you can’t imagine Christian Slater is still alive, and in the next scene viola, he’s A-OK. Same with Wesley Snipes in the hideous* Sugar Hill.
Others?
*Redeemed only by the classic exchange when he is chatting up the babe he has met:
“I’m an actress.” “Oh, yeah? Which restaurant?”
This thread can’t continue until somebody mentions Glenn Close in a bathtub. The name of the movie isn’t even at issue.
Are you talking about when he gets it right above the eye?
Best ‘back from the dead’ is from the Abyss, where she is berated into coming back to life.
Oh, and simliarly, (among many, I know) Sleeping with the Enemy.
Alan Arkin in “Wait Until Dark.”
That post should have said 'Best & Scariest."
Not necessarily a favorite, but I think the quintessential “surprise non-death” would be when Indiana Jones crawled up the cliff to stand with his dad and everyone looking down crying over his demise.
I think any slasher movie starring Freddy, Jason, or any of the multi sequel characters would qualify.
Chop them, stab them, shoot them, blow them up. Any one of them is unstopable, and imortal in wayx that would make the elder gods look like ants in a sandbox.Han Solo being set free from the carbonite was great.
The worst return from the dead that springs to my mind is a literary one; Sherlock Holmes - it was such an obvious and bad way to wring some extra stories out of a series that had come to a quite satisfactory conclusion.
Ha! I’ll do you one better: Dallas. 'Nuff said.
Definitely Joe Highhawk in Desert Kickboxer. You think that Santos’s bullet went into his head, but in actuality it just grazed the side. Hawk lies in the gravel, seemingly dead, but moments later his finger twitches. and he raises his head to look up. Unfortunately, he notices his trailer-home is on fire, and in seconds, after a montage of his posessions inside, it explodes in a gigantic fireball. A hawk then flies overhead, screeching.
Amazing.
IMHO, some of the best Sherlock Holmes stories were written after his ‘demise’; but I agree–it was a good, dramatic conclusion with its emotional impact cheapened by his resurrection afterwards.
Viola was in Twelfth Night, not True Romance.
Spock’s return to life in STIII has to be the worst.
Does the Aragorn-over-cliff debacle from The Two Towers qualify? (Obviously, no one who knew the books was fooled…but I suppose someone might have been.) If so, then that’s my choice for worst.
I don’t know if this quite qualifies, if the spirit of this thread is ‘apparently dead but just fine after’ …but does anybody remember that non-death scene from Seven? The drug dealer that was kept alive on only IVs for a year, and the cough that made your heart skip a beat?
As a counter-example, in the recent House of Wax remake:
The heroine just whales on one of the killers, giving him a good ten shots in the head with a baseball bat. That sucker’s D-E-D dead and ain’t coming back. It was downright refreshing to see a character in a slasher flick having the determination to get the killer down and see it through, rather than putting in a half-effort and get chased again later by a seemingly-unstoppable killer.
The son in the recent War of the Worlds. His coming back from presumed death forces the sickly icing onto that mediocre cake of a film.
Oh dear. I think I will concede on that one; way back in school, my English teacher told us that if we ever wrote a story that ended “…and I woke up and it had all been a dream”, he would beat us with sticks.