The new action film sequel Crank: High Voltage is being advertised with the tagline “He was dead…But he got better.” Aside from sort of ruining the ending to the first Crank for those of us who haven’t seen it, this copy from the posters has been receiving a lot of attention for how ridiculous it sounds. Fans of the original have to disagree with the tagline, because they know Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) was not dead; in fact it is clear from the final scene that he miraculously survived that fall from the helicopter. Meanwhile, people less familiar with the movie simply find the idea of a dead character being resurrected for the benefit of a sequel to be laughably unacceptable, as if such an idea is unheard of in Hollywood.

But even if Chelios had been officially declared dead at the end of Crank, the sequel certainly wouldn’t be the first to revive a main character for a follow-up. Obviously horror films do it all the time, and it’s not exactly uncommon in sci-fi, fantasy, action and comic book genres, either. Even while ignoring the invincibility convention of contemporary slasher films, we were able to select six sequels in which a deceased (or presumed deceased) character returns.

Warning: Spoilers may be found after the jump.
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Need help cutting down your Christmas tree? Jason Vorhees can help. Want someone to cook holiday dinner? Hannibal Lecter’s got you. Even the Mummy is here to bandage your kid’s leg after a see-saw accident involving Chucky. It’s a horror villain family Christmas, featuring Darth Vader looking beautiful walking through the snow, Freddie Krueger snipping a bouquet of flowers with his glove, and Samara popping out of the television to deliver presents.

Yes, that present is a DirecTV dish, and this is a commercial. But it’s old, it’s foreign and it’s one of the more enjoyable DirecTV ads ever made. My only criticism: shouldn’t Leatherface have been in charge of the tree cutting? Jason could have just wandered around with no significant duty, like Dracula. Also, I would have loved an appearance from Tony Todd, preferably holding some candy canes. Otherwise, this clip is perfect. I’d love to see it become an actual video e-card for the holidays, along with the old SNL Season’s Greetings skits (for those wondering where Frankenstein’s monster is, he’s over with Tonto and Tarzan singing “Away in a Manger”).

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Anticipating the worst from Diane English’s new remake of The Women is not just typical low expectations regarding remakes in general. My dread is specifically based on dissatisfaction with remakes and updates of films from the 1930s, arguably the best decade in cinema (it is certainly my favorite). While I may recognize and appreciate some favorable redos, such as DePalma’s Scarface (of which I’ve never really been a fan), Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills and the multiple repeats from Hitchcock, I am more often disappointed with attempts to recreate ‘30s classics, even when I approach them with already low standards.

Worst, for me, doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the film alone, especially when related to remakes and updates. The titles and versions I’ve selected are hardly the worst in terms of craft or production value — you’ll note there are no Dracula movies on this list — and a few would almost be acceptable if they were more unique or solitary works.

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• Our complete Comic-Con coverage
• Lists: 10 Best Masturbation Scenes; 10 Ways Man on Wire is JUST LIKE The Dark Knight; Unsatisfying Threequels
• Videos: Che trailer; The Joker endorses McCain; Disney racism; Harry Potter trailer; W trailer; Harry Potter rocks the vote
• On FilmCouch: Comic-Con, Mardi Gras: Made in China
• The Secret History of Mardi Gras: Penises
• The Safdies hire Ronnie Bronstein
• The Media Diet: Tom Quinn
• Reviews: In Search of a Midnight Kiss
• George Bush says the 3452nd Mummy movie is good for “Oriental” diplomacy!
• Malcolm McDowell and the sex appeal of the psychopath
• Oliver Stone’s W: too soon?
• Two Lovers finds distribution
• Marketing Casablanca
• There was some confusion as to whether or not Zach Snyder is as much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan boy as he could be.
• But there’s no confusion about the lessons he could learn from Steven Spielberg’s disastrous E.T. video game
• Batman nerds attack
• Telluride Film Festival widget
• Toronto Film Festival documentaries
• My Effortless Brilliance in New York
• Say goodbye to R-rated horror
• Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like

WASHINGTON, July 31 (Xinhua) — U.S. President George W. Bush said Wednesday that U.S.-China relations are good and important, and he is “honored” to be invited to attend the Beijing premiere of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, a new Jet Li/Brendan Fraser fantasy film.

“The fact that both countries are honoring the 30th anniversary of the relationship is a statement about good relations,” he told reporters from China, South Korea and Thailand at the White House ahead of his upcoming trip to the three countries. Also, the fact that both China and the United States are opening new Magic Johnson Theaters in each other’s capitals is “a signal of how important the relationship is,” Bush added.

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• Can that Mummy movie, an obvious, impersonal cash-in on the growing international market, perform competitively with The Dark Knight at the box office this weekend? Maybe! Can that Swing Vote movie, Kevin Costner’s labor of love which he paid for with his own money? Probably not!
• The release of Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been pushed back from June 2009 to Memorial Day 2010, ostensibly to allow more time for post-production, but maybe also to allow for more clever counter-programming against Transformers 2.
• Chris Millis has sold the film rights to his as-yet-unpublished novel God and California to Lionsgate. The book, which he’ll adapt himself, focuses on “an Iraq war vet and a disgraced Catholic priest who travel from Gotham to California in a pink 1975 El Dorado in a week, breaking the Ten Commandments one by one.”

When I first went to Comic-Con, almost a decade ago, it was purely as a girlfriend. My then-love interest and I had gone to our respective home towns for the summer, and one day he called and asked for my measurements––he was making me an Uhura dress.

I understood then that part of my job at Comic-Con was partially to avoid saying anything too cynical or aggressive to his friends from back home (including the girlfriend of his best friend, who went every year in full Slave Leia regalia). But mainly, my job was to look good. I was young, and I went along with it because I was flattered that anyone would actually want to put me on display. Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, and if memory serves, I wasn’t very good at it. I am a girl of varied talents, but that summer I learned that being passive, high-concept arm candy doesn’t make use of any of them.

Which is not to say that I had a terrible time; when we got to San Diego, I ditched the boyfriend and found my own niche. I remember there being a fair number of a girlfriends, floating around at various levels of excitement or reluctance, but there were also women who were there because they were active members of one of the communities represented, either as educated consumers or as makers, or both, and across generations, they seemed to be talking to one another. My memory could be fuzzy, but I don’t remember a single booth babe. I do remember a lot of preteens in Sailor Moon suits, but that’s another matter.

But blah, blah, blah — times change. From 2000 to 2007, Comic-Con attendance tripled. Studios started to swoop in in earnest around 2001, after X-Men and the ascendancy of sites like Ain’t it Cool taught them the power of the permanent adolescent male market. As long as we’re on the subject of adolescence, if my experience at Comic-Con 2008 is any indication, the options for young girls here have, on the surface, become quite a bit more varied than the either/or between mannequin and active consumer/producer; at the same time, most of these new options seem to amount to little more than one side of that old binary split.

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The casts and crews of The Mummy: Brendan Fraser Must Do Huge Business Internationally and Death Race show off their wares. Yay, unnecessary sequels and remakes! (Yes, Karina wrote this intro.)

Highlights:

–Sam Raimi says another Evil Dead movie is “in the wheelhouse.” If you’re not familiar with it, that expression means “being very close to accomplishing a goal.”

–Two surprise clips of Drag Me To Hell were shown; one was good/funny, the other awful.

–Sid and Marty Krofft say H.R. Puffnstuf will be turned into a movie after Land of the Lost, and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters after that.”
–Brendan Fraser is apparently perennially hopped up on over-the-counter cold medicine.

–Joan Allen swears a lot in Death Race.

Full live blog after the jump!

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• Hollywood loves the energy crisis! Not only is there evidence that “higher gas prices boost boxoffice by prompting consumers to opt for the local multiplex over longer trips,” but foreign oil investors, prompted by a desire to avoid taxes on windfall profits, “look more favorably on the film biz — any film, really — because it means that even if a movie loses, say, 20% or 30% of its money, investors still come out on top because those losses pale compared with what a government might have taken.”
• “There’s a superhero summit under way at Warner Bros,” says David S. Cohen at Variety, as the studio and subsidiary DC Comics meet to work out a “master plan” for shilling superheroes going forward.
• The Chinese censorship board is demanding that cuts be made to the third Mummy movie––which shot for three months in China, and incorporates a replica of the Great Wall––but they’re not publicly specifying what it’ll take to let the film be shown in the country. Is anyone else starting to suspect that the Chinese censors just have really good taste?
• The AMPTP won’t accept any of SAG’s counter-offers, and SAG won’t settle for the AMPTP’s “final” deal. So what now? No one knows for sure, but with SAG members continuing to work with no contract, it’s possible that the studios will “declare an impasse and impose the terms and conditions of the new offer.”

Cory Doctrow at BoingBoing points to this scanned article from a 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, which goes inside the Hollywood makeup studio of the era. Much of the story concentrates on how Boris Karloff (as you know, my classic horror movie hearthrob) was made up to look like Frankenstein and The Mummy, but my favorite part is the headline screencapped above.