Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), with his bloated, mentally retarded assistant, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), care for the city’s cemetery, a job that has become tougher lately as the dead have been leaving their graves. Not wanting to lose his job, Francesco handles the problem on his own, shooting the zombies each night and re-burying them. Complications arise when Francesco falls for a beautiful widow (Anna Falchi) with a corpse fetish.
The darkest of dark comedies, Cemetery Man is a twisted tale of love, sex, and death, all covered in blood. It starts with a bang (literally, as Francesco shoots the evening’s “returner”) and picks up steam, with plenty of gore and substantial nudity between jokes and bouts of philosophy. Add in the gothic sets, beautiful cinematography, and stoic Rupert Everett and it’s well on its way to being the best zombie movie of all time.
And then it falls apart. The story meanders until it is completely lost and just stops. Things happen to Francesco, but few of them make sense and none of them fit together. Clones of the widow (only identified as “She” in the credits) pop up without any connection to the risen undead or to each other, and leave again. Francesco kills some biker punks, and nothing comes of it. Gnaghi has a love affair with a severed head that ends at the two-thirds mark. The philosophical insights on love and death become empty ramblings, and reveal that what little the film had to say it covered in the first few minutes. And worst of all, it becomes dull.
Did they have a finished script when they started the shoot? I can see the first day of production as Italian director Michele Soavi announced to his international cast, “We’ve got 47 pages of great script here. I can’t imagine any reason why we won’t have the rest done in plenty of time. We just have to iron out a few ideas.” The film is set firmly in the wrong direction when a brief subplot, plopped down in the middle of the picture, swipes the entire story of the unsettling Tod Browning/Lon Chaney silent picture, The Unknown, about a man who has important parts of his body surgically removed in order to get a girl. This may be a little too dark for comedy. Cemetery Man never recovers it’s momentum.
I am hard on this film. It is certainly better than a majority of zombie features, but I don’t expect much from your standard rotting-corpse-eats-brains flick. This one promised more. It still has Rupert Everett and some nicely macabre moments. It also has one of the most artistic (and erotic) sex scenes in horror, with Falchi and her impressive breasts perched on Everett, positioned so that the wings of a statue appear to be hers. Much of the picture is enjoyable, but the primary emotion connected to it is disappointment.
Outside of the U.S., it more often goes under the far more pertinent title of Dellamorte Dellamore, which is both the main character’s name and a clearer statement of what the film is about (Of Death, Of Love).