aka Dellamorte Dellamore

• Directed by Michele Soavi
• Written by Gianni Romoli, based on the novel by Tiziano Sclavi
• Starring
  • Rupert Everett
  • Francois Hadji-Lazaro
  • Anna Falchi
  • Mickey Knox
  • Fabiana Formica

It’s not usually my practice to rehearse the pedegree of Italian directors and their place in the Eurofilm canon, mainly because I don’t pretend to be an expert. However, given that some people label this movie “the last great Italian horror film,” it behooves me to place this movie within the genre thusly:

Michele Soavi started out on both sides of the camera, acting for and assisting such luminaries as Dario Argento and Joe D’Amato (I’ll let you decide if you want to read that sentence sarcastically). He got his first directing job from D’Amato, 1987’s The Church. Cemetery Man was his fourth feature, an adaptation of a sprawling novel by Tiziano Sclavi; it also drew considerable inspiration from Sclavi’s popular comic series, Dylan Dog. And the casting of Rupert Everett as the lead in the movie was a considerable coup, as Everett, whose movies had garnered far more attention in continental Europe than in the U.S. by that time, had been the visual inspiration for Sclavi’s lead character Dylan Dog.

I tell you all of this not only because, you know, provenance and credit-where-credit-is-due and all that, but because Cemetery Man’s main problem is a fluidity of plot structure which, if you didn’t know it to be an adapted work, you’d swear was made up in real-time on the set. It’s a striking and evocative piece of work, but by the time the closing credits roll, you feel that the movie you just finished isn’t the same one you started watching almost two hours ago.

Laurel and Hardy? Mutt and Jeff? Loggins and Messina? Move over!

Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of the cemetery in the small town of Buffalora. It’s a fairly undemanding job, or at least it should be; it’s a well-populated graveyard, but by no means massive, and Dellamorte has his trusted assistant for the heavy lifting, a roly-poly monosyllabic troll named Gnaghi (pronounced “Naggy”) who lives in the caretaker’s cottage cellar, played by François Hadji-Lazaro, who is apparently Italy’s answer to Curly Howard. The only thing marring the placidity of the cemetery — or relieving the stultifying boredom of the position, take your pick — is that the dead interred there all rise, usually about seven days after their death (though, as we see, that’s more a gross approximation or median than a hard-and-fast rule). Dellamorte has never been beyond the confines of Buffalora, and doesn’t know if the town elders know of the problem — or, indeed, if this is what cemeteries are really like the world over — but he sees his job as entailing that the cemetery stays quiet and the dead stay planted, so he and Gnaghi make a practice of dispatching the recently returned by destroying their brains, either with a well-aimed shovel blade or some homemade dum-dum bullets.

This is the equilibrium state of his life that will soon be disturbed, then. No social life — partly by choice, and partly because the louts in town have spread far and wide the rumor that Dellamorte has no penis — but he does his job well, and he’s come to accept the strictures of his circumstances…

Until she comes into his life.

Hey, YOU try getting through this movie without making a “boner” joke.

The “she” in this case is a young widow played by model-turned-actress Anna Falchi, mourning the loss of her much-older but still very virile husband. It takes only one look for Dellamorte to be hopelessly smitten; it takes a little longer, at least a couple of visits, for her to warm up back to him, and this only because he takes her on a tour of the dank, sodden ossuary, which turns out to be a fetish of hers. (Man, if I had a dime for every date like that…) Their relationships blossoms (by which I mean they get groiny with abandon) right on top of her deceased husband’s grave, and wouldn’t you just know that said husband chooses that very night to claw his way to the surface and interruptus some coitus. The young widow is bitten during the attack, and though zombie bites aren’t infectious in this movie, they’re still icky, and she ends up dead of fright.

And thus begins Dellamorte’s long experience with loss and longing, with the pain of separation and the even greater pain of returning… Yeah, I know, that’s a pretty pretentious sentence, and mostly it’s there to cover for the fact that the plot really heads off in several directions at once. Through the middle section of the movie, the zombie-horror elements are sustained largely by a subplot brought to the fore: On a trip into town, Gnaghi is smitten with the mayor’s teenaged taughter Valentina (Fabiana Formica). He promptly throws up on her, of course. But that very same day, Valentina and a half-dozen of her motorcycle-riding friends are involved in a bloody accident with a bus full of nuns and Boy Scouts. If you think that sounds like the setup for a joke, you’d be right; the spectacle of undead Scouts stumping around the cemetery, chomping their jaws and rubbing two sticks together until Dellamorte blows out their brainpan, is the kind of humor which I relish and which makes my wife shake her head and wonder what she ever saw in me.

Check the one on the right. The one rubbing two sticks together. I love that.

Oh, but I was talking about Gnaghi. Right. He waits in gleeful anticipation for Valentina’s reanimation, whereupon he takes her very friendly head — which got severed in the motorcycle accident and wasn’t reattached very securely because, hey, nobody knew she’d be needing it again — and places it in the blown-out picture tube of his television that got destroyed during the Boy Scout attack. Presto! Gnaghi’s in love! (And really, Valentina’s a much nicer person now than she was before death.) Until an altercation involving the mayor (Stefano Masciarelli), which leaves Valentina doubly dead, and Buffalora in need of a new mayor.

And its right about at the introduction of the new mayor (Pietro Genuardi) that we start to worry that the movie has decided to veer onto a new course, because the mayor’s personal secretary is also played by Anna Falchi, and naturally catches Dellamorte’s attention. She seems inclined to return his passion, except that she’s got an extreme phobia toward intercourse — which, according to the rumors in town, makes Dellamorte the perfect man for her. We then go off on a subplot about Dellamorte’s quest for permanent emasculation in order to woo her.

But wait, things go even further afield, right about when the spectre of Death himself shows up and suggests to Dellamorte that instead of killing the dead, he should kill the living. So when his relationship with this latest version of his beloved goes sour, that’s what he does: He uses the gun that had previously been used to keep the denizens of the cemetery in their plots, and starts knocking people off — some because of past grievances, some because of convenience, and at least a couple because yet another Anna Falchi character turns out to be a prostitute. And Dellamorte gets frustrated because no one will even suspect him of the crimes.

The man with two brains! Well, two heads, anyway.

Do you feel like you’ve gradually wandered into a different movie? I sure did, and it’s not a better one. Suddenly, we’re saddled with a protagonist who’s taken a left turn into deeply unsympathetic territory. Viewers can easily identify with a character who feels inadequate to anything more than the job he’s resigned to, who’s tormented by loss, who feels trapped in a dead-end town, wondering if the rest of the world is any better. But a lot of that audience identification drains away when that same protagonist starts casually blowing strangers away.

The returning dead seem completely forgotten by the end of the movie; in its place, we have a conclusions that jumps with both feet into surrealism. It’s a startlingly unsatisfying way to end a movie which had so much going for it earlier, and reinforces the feeling, mentioned earlier, that despite the long pedigree of adaptation which led to this movie, that it was moe or less made up as it went along, and that Michele Soavi got bored and decided to make some other movie at the two-thirds mark.

“It’s always death metal album covers. Just once, I’d like to pose for a Gloria Estefan CD.”

Of course, I am an ugly American, and insist on judging foreign films by the standards of soulless Hollywood, which places so much emphasis on things like structure and story logic. I’m sure that if I were able to set my consciousness to “Italian mode,” for a few minutes, I’d be able to appreciate the movie as fully as the Italian audiences who absolutely adored it, instead of the audiences in the rest of the world, where it bombed completely. But you didn’t come here for an Italian review, you came here for my review, and so what you get is my extremely ambivalent final assessment, which has to balance my appreciation for the first part of the movie with my disappointment in a third act which runs off the rails.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 40-ish (never really got a headcount on the Boy Scouts)
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0