Title:
The Cemetery Man aka Dellamorte Dellamore
What Year?:
1994
Classification:
Unnatural Experiment
Rating:
Ow, My Brain!!! (Unrated/ NR)
When I reviewed ChildrenShouldn’t Play With Dead Things ,I mentioned that I first thought of it when I included an “unrated” category for this feature. This time, I’m getting to one of two or so I had in mind all along. On consideration, I felt strongly enough about it that I set aside a movie I actually own to clear a space for it, at least for the moment. I did this because this one is that weird, even by the standards of this feature. I would go so far as to rank it with (dear Logos) Shanks, which I reviewed in the first incarnation of the feature. The strangest part is that it was one of the latest movies to come up, behind only Splinter, and exactly a year after Jurassic Park. The world had moved on, but somebody still wanted to do one more zombie movie. I can offer no better introduction to The Cemetery Man.
Our story begins with a man talking on the phone when there is a banging at the door. He quite nonchalantly draws a gun and shoots the pale figure that bursts in. We learn that our antihero Francesco is the keeper of a cemetery where the dead return to life as cannibalistic undead he refers to as “returners”. With the help of his disadvantaged companion Naghi, he puts down the undead with impressive efficiency. Naturally, he hides these goings-on from authorities, with the semi-explicit rationale that they would close the cemetery and leave him unemployed. Things begin to get out of hand when he takes a fancy to a widow, only to see her killed by her reanimated spouse. He must then deal with the increased volume caused by a bus wreck that claims a cyclist and the mayor’s daughter, followed by the distraction when his beloved seems to reappear in a series of new identities. That’s when the Grim Reaper appears and calls on him to get a head start by killing the living.
The Cemetery Man was possibly the last of a wave of “spaghetti zombie” movies from the Italian film industry (see Zombie and City of the Walking Dead), based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Italian writer and artist Tiziano Sclavi. The film was coproduced with support from Germany and France, with emerging media conglomerate Studio Canal taking a good part of the credit. British actor Rupert Everett was cast in the lead role, with French musician Francois Hadji-Lazaro as Naghi and Finnish model Anna Talchi as his lady love(s). It was released in Italy under the same title as the original novel. It did not reach US release until at late as 1996, when it first appeared under the title Cemetery Man.
I first heard of this movie from The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. I only watched it a few years back, when I made a foolhardy attempt to watch it on a long ride to work. That made the viewing for this review the first time I watched the movie without interruption. It was yet another movie I went back to without any judgments in advance. It was first and foremost a strange ride, though not in the way that usually stands out to me. No matter how strange the events and imagery, the movie lays them out within a linear narrative according to a reasonably clear internal logic, which is what usually keeps a film on my good side (see Plan9 From Outer Space). This time, though, I find it at least a minor downside, simply because it belies some of the movie’s deeper pretensions. The last third or so in particular comes across like a sane person’s idea of madness; the artists can capture the shape of the thing, but not the thing itself.
Still, the movie certainly delivers plenty of strange and surreal twists on the genre. The makeup and effects for the undead are easily among the best on record. They are grungy, disfigured and utterly malevolent, and the film never lets us see too much of them. Most of the action is clumped in a scene with a group of boy scouts from the bus, who click their jaws reflexively as they creep into the cabin. Things take a further turn for the worse when one of them actually gets hold of Francesco’s gun, while Naghi remains unconcerned until his TV takes a direct hit. My pick for the best single zombie is his lady love on her second return, which leaves him confused and fretful. She looks like a perverse imitation of a fairy queen, with roots and branches either stuck to her or growing straight out of her body. She remains utterly silent as she approaches, throwing him offguard long enough for the inevitable strike.
Even more surreal than the zombies is the movie’s dialogue. In no particular order, there is the mayor’s daughter, who chatters as inanely after death as in life, and her father, who frets about the tragedy “so close to the election”. There is a girl who moons for the cyclist even in mourning, who we will return to momentarily. Then there is a steady stream of one-liners from Francesco, who handles the undead as capably as any number of protagonists in more standard post-apocalyptic fair. When he learns the lady love’s husband is already 2 weeks deceased, he casually says, “Thank goodness.” When the scouts arrive, he remarks that he will need more ammunition, while during their attack, his first response is that they came back “sooner than we thought”. After he has to dispatch the head of the mayor’s daughter, he comments that she was “getting a little off”.
The “one scene” has to be one I practically forgot about, the return of the cyclist. It begins when Francesco interrupts the mourning girl, who literally clings to the tombstone. Suddenly, the earth shakes, and the cyclist bursts from the grave on his motorcycle like a pharaoh buried with his chariot. He is perhaps the most elaborate of the movie’s undead, still wearing a shattered helmet with debris sticking out of various places. At first, he merely rides on, with the girl stumbling after, while Francesco grumbles and swears at the uncharacteristically fast target. After a short distance, the girl gets ahead. She presses her face against the wheel while the rider gazes down inscrutably. He blinks, in itself a horrifying sight I haven’t quite worked out, and helps her aboard. When Francesco catches up, however, it is clear that his drive is no different. Still, the girl actively protests, “He’s only eating me!”, then more forcefully, “I shall be eaten by whomever I please!” He responds only that he is doing his job. Then the returner lunges, and the film’s most fateful twist ensues.
In giving this film an unrated rank, I did about what I expected to, yet still came very close to giving it a much less kind rating. The main things that stopped me were the very high production values and genuinely clever twists on the zombie concept. It is, however, an especially egregious case of the parts being greater than the whole. What is far worse is that it sacrifices its narrative clarity, as well as the relatively redeeming qualities of the main character, for “artistic” twists that make little sense and increasingly just don’t work, up to and including the ending. To me, the strongest indictment is its timing. By comparison, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and even Shanks made “sense” in the 1970s, when everybody was trying to be experimental and weird. By the 1990s, the weird-for-the-sake-of-weird approach had devolved to pseudointellectual posturing. It’s hard to say what could have made zombie movies relevant again in the decade of CGI, but this film only gave us one more very literal dead end.
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