AKA Dellamorte Dellamore, 105 Minutes, Color, Italy, 1994

Written By: Gianni Romoli (based on the novel by Tiziano Scalvi)

Directed By: Michele Soavi

Dramatis Personae:

Rupert Everett is Francesco Dellamorte, depressed caretaker of the Buffalora cemetery, and freelance Zombie Hunter.

Francois Hadji-Lazaro is Gnaghi, Dellamorte's slow-witted, digusting, yet somehow adorable assistant.

Anna Falchi is credited only as "She", object of Dellamorte's affection that recurs constantly throughout the film in multiple guises: a necrophiliac widow, a secretary with strange sexual hangups, and a prostitute working her way through school. Obviously, Dellamorte has some issues...

Anton Alexander is Franco, Buffalora civil clerk and the closest thing to a friend Dellamorte has.

Mickey Knox is Straniero, incompetent and pompous chief of the Buffalora police.

Stefano Masciarelli is Scanarotti, equally incompetent and neurotic mayor of Buffalora.

Fabiana Formica is Valentina, spoiled daughter of Scanarotti, and object of Gnaghi's clumsy affections.

Alessandro Zamattio is Claudio, local motorcycle punk, and town heartthrob for some reason.

Commentary:

Buckle up, kids, because I am quite possibly about to commit Internet Movie Reviewer heresy with my next admission: I just don't care for zombie movies.

There, I said it, and I'm glad. I'd say it again if I had to.

It's not that I hate them, per se. It's just that I find them boring. And frankly, often pretentious. There seems to be some inherent quality in the zombie movie that attracts the pretentious filmmaker – even more so than the vampire movie, if you can believe that – one with an Important Message™ about modern society that he or she needs to get across. And that message is usually some variation of "The zombies are US, get it?" Granted, you could make the argument that every monster of folklore is symbolic of some basic human quality or fear: vampires represent our fear of sex, werewolves our capacity for violence, etc. But zombie movies tend to be different. Most of the time their plots are less about the zombies themselves and more about the human characters' reactions to the zombies, making the monsters the least interesting part of the monster movie. And more often than not that tends to mean the plot involves a bunch of hateful people bickering with each other until the zombies devour them, which isn't much fun to watch either. There are only so many ways you can say, “They’re US, get it?” before it gets dull and repetitive. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. As maligned as the Resident Evil movies are, at least stuff happens in them (and they often feature Milla Jovovich wearing skimpy outfits and kicking lots of ass, which is all you need to say to get me to go to the movies).

All that being said, for a little while Cemetery Man could be seen as a refreshing change of pace from your average zombie movie. For a little while, the plot goes in a different direction than most, toying with clichés and expectations. For a little while. Then the plot goes completely off the rails, and it becomes just as pretentious as its contemporaries, if not more so.

The protagonist of our little film is Francesco Dellamorte, a depressed and depressing young man who oversees the Buffalora town cemetery. Buffalora is a tiny rural Italian town where not much happens, so it’s kind of surprising just how busy Dellamorte is. For the Buffalora cemetery has a problem: the dead don’t stay buried. Every so often a freshly-buried corpse will rise from the dead and wander off. Only severe head trauma – like a bullet or a blunt object in the brain pain – will kill them permanently. There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to which bodies will reanimate; the only rule seems to be that they reanimate seven days after burial. Dellamorte doesn’t know why this happens, nor does he seem to particularly care. Putting down the rebellious dead is just part of his depressing job.

And boy, is Dellamorte’s life depressing. His caretaker’s shack is as decrepit as the rest of the town, and his only companion is the half-wit Gnaghi, who can only express himself in grunts and who does all the heavy labor (like carrying wayward bodies back to their graves and so forth). He gets few visitors, except for the crazy old lady who stops by to see her buried friends, and his night-time phone calls with Franco in town. He rarely ventures into Buffalora proper, as the local motorcycle gang constantly harasses him and spreads rumors about his sexual inadequacies. The only thing he reads is the phone book, which he “updates” himself as people die. As he’s never been outside the boundaries of Buffalora, Dellamorte has no idea if this kind of thing is common in other towns or other cemeteries, but he lacks the wherewithal to find out first-hand.

This depressing status quo changes one day, as the grave of a recently-deceased old man is visited by his widow. A much younger, strikingly attractive woman; Dellamorte is immediately smitten. Of course, since he doesn’t get much human interaction up at the cemetery, his attempts at small talk fall flat. Nevertheless, when She returns another day, they manage to hit it off. She is apparently turned on by ossuaries, and the cemetery has a great one. They proceed to make love that very night…on the grave of her husband, no less. In retrospect, not the best idea: the old man arises at that very inopportune moment, and manages to take a chunk out of his wife before Dellamorte can subdue him. She expires of shock before help can arrive, and Dellamorte must contemplate what he will do if she ends up reanimating…

This incident finally prompts Dellamorte to go into town and try and get something done about this zombie problem. He and Gnaghi meet the Mayor and his daughter for lunch, but the meeting does not go well. Scanarotti is more concerned with the upcoming reelection than he is with actually doing anything constructive, and dismisses Dellamorte as causing an unwelcome fuss. And Gnaghi becomes infatuated with Valentina, but unable to express himself, he ends up throwing up all over her. Valentina flees into the arms of Claudio, who takes her on a hair-raising ride through the narrow mountain roads outside of town…and promptly right into a massive accident that gets the two of them and a busload of Boy Scouts killed. Things get a lot more complicated at the cemetery when the dead rise earlier than expected, and Dellamorte is up to his armpits in murderous undead moppets in short pants. Claudio also rises from the dead, much to the delight of one of his girlfriends who had been weeping at his gravesite at that moment. When Dellamorte tracks the two of them down and puts a bullet through Claudio’s head, he accidentally kills the girl as well. This incident proves to be the one that sends Dellamorte off the deep end, as he wonders if he just shouldn’t cut out the middleman altogether and start killing people himself…

I want to give Cemetery Man a little bit of credit, as the film is certainly evocative. Having studied under Italian horror legend Dario Argento, director Michele Soavi knows how to craft an unsettling image. All of the set pieces evoke a kind of primal unpleasantness, the sort of distinctly Italian nastiness found in the giallo films of past decades. Consider the appalling living conditions of Dellamorte and Gnaghi: Gnaghi’s grotesque eating habits and Dellamorte’s tendency to walk around half-naked in the most horrible bathroom in history indicate just how removed from basic human social behavior their isolation has made them (although a shirtless Rupert Everett may have been some attempt at cheesecake…). Note the sleaze permeating the motorcycle gang that hangs out in Buffalora town square, as they drive Dellamorte into festering murderous rage with their sexual slander. And then there is the none-too-subtle misogynistic undertones dealing with Anna Falchi’s characters, as they seem to exist solely to emasculate Dellamorte in a variety of convoluted ways. And of course, the gore. When a zombie takes one to the head, it’s as visceral any Italian Gutmuncher. The entire movie generates a tangible sense of discomfort in a viewer, like something from a previous, less “safe” time in movie history. It’s all so nasty, you’re not quite sure how far they’re going to go. Nearly every frame of the film makes you want a good hot shower.

Unfortunately, that genuine unpleasantness is the film’s own undoing. Cemetery Man positions itself as a sort of sendup or parody of zombie movies, playing on the conventions of the genre and giving them its own twist. But the problem is that Cemetery Man just isn’t that clever. Or very funny, for that matter. The world it creates is just so authentically horrid, so unpleasant, so true to the tradition of the Italian Gutmunchers, that any humor to be had falls flat. This is a nasty world, where nasty things happen to nasty people, and the abortive attempts at comedy don’t make it any less so.

As for its efforts to play on zombie movie conventions, well, that sort of backfires too. Cemetery Man plays fast and loose with the rules of zombie movies, which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing at all. But it breaks its own rules too: we’re told at the beginning that, at the Buffalora cemetery, corpses rise from the dead seven days after burial. Sometimes. Some of them do, some of them don’t. But it’s not long before this one rule goes completely by the wayside: the Boy Scouts rise before seven days are up, and by the end of the movie the dead are rising completely at random. Cemetery Man also can’t seem to make up its mind about zombie behavior, either. In this world, zombies don’t hunger for the flesh of the living, nor do their bites spread the infection to other victims. But that doesn’t stop them from attacking Dellamorte. Sometimes. Sometimes they’re murderous, and other times they just sort of wander around. Some of them retain their personalities from their lives, and some are just mindless shamblers. It all seems to depend on what the script requires at that moment. So little do the rules matter to Cemetery Man, that it seems to be assuring us that the zombies don’t matter. What matters is what the presence of the zombies does to Dellamorte, how they affect his mental state and his outlook on life. So it’s not so much an Italian zombie movie as it is one of those European art films full of beautiful people bemoaning how life is pointless and death is beautiful.

And I’d be okay with that, if Francesco Dellamorte were a sympathetic character. As it is, he barely has a personality; he’s more the incarnation of boredom and depression. Granted, his job and his life are pretty damned depressing, but it’s hard to sympathize with him when you consider how much of it is self-inflicted. He hates his life, but he always manages to rationalize his way out of self-improvement. Asking the town government for help at the cemetery would be too much work – “It’s easier just to shoot them,” he says to Franco after being presented with a form to complete – and leaving town is out of the question; there’s no guarantee life outside Buffalora is any different. His only friends are Franco – whom he hardly ever sees, since he rarely goes into town – and Gnaghi, and poor Gnaghi is the object of his constant abuse. You get the sense that Dellamorte just doesn’t like himself that much, and he projects it onto everyone around him (which, of course, makes everyone want to avoid him, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle). And rather than do something about it, he just wallows his self-loathing as he waits for the next zombie to show up at his door, thinking such thoughts as “I know more dead people than live ones,” or “Why bother getting to know them? They all end up here anyway.” Not exactly an endearing guy…but again, pretty in keeping with zombie movie conventions: you’re almost rooting for the zombies by the end, if just to get him to shut up about how pointless life is.

Seeing movies like Cemetery Man, it makes me wonder: am I just missing something? This movie is hailed as a cult classic by those who are really into cult movies, and I rack my brains trying to find out why. Is there something about it that I should be seeing that I’m just not? Is the quality being emitted on a frequency my brain is incapable of perceiving? Is it ME, and not the world, that is crazy?

Or maybe I just don’t care for zombie movies…

Things To Look For:

- As you may have guessed, I have not read the original Tiziano Scalvi novel upon which Cemetery Man was based, so I couldn’t tell you how accurate the movie is to the book. But am curious now to possibly get a hold of a copy. I find myself wondering if so many of the unexplained things in the movie were explained in the novel (like the plants in the cemetery seeming to be involved in the rising of the dead, for example). Then again, this IS Italian graphic novel stuff we’re talking about here, so who knows?

- I’m open to the possibility that, this being a foreign film, something might be lost in translation, and there is some subtext that I’m just not getting. Some nuances of Italian culture – or of Italian language – that just go right over my Stupid American head. The pun about Dellamorte’s name that just doesn’t translate very well into English. The tendency for everyone to call Dellamorte “engineer,” even though he hasn’t got a degree in anything. Claudio’s inexplicable status as the town heartthrob, despite his biker grossness (granted, he’s probably the least sleazy of the bikers…). I do get the sense that I might enjoy this film more – or at least get more out of it – were I more versed in Italian film. Though I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

- In addition to Dario Argento, Michele Soavi also studied under Terry Gilliam, and he clearly picked up a few things from him. Notably, Gilliam’s obsession with bureaucracy. Franco’s office at Buffalora town hall looks like something out of Brazil: he is drowning in paperwork, with stacks of files and papers six feet tall that turn the office into a maze (although, Buffalora is such a small town it makes you wonder why there is so much paperwork). The mayor and the chief of police are clueless, self-serving buffoons who couldn’t be effective even if they wanted to (Straniero in particular doesn’t seem like he could solve a piggy bank theft). To try and get anything done about Buffalora’s zombie problem through official channels would take forever. You can’t help but agree with Dellamorte; it’s easier just to shoot them.

- Speaking of Terry Gilliam’s influence, check this guy out:

This is Death. He appears to Dellamorte in what may or may not be a particularly vivid hallucination, warning him to leave the dead alone. It’s an awesome puppet, and it’s almost identical to Death from The Adventures of the Baron Munchausen. It was awesome there, and it’s awesome here. A little too awesome, unfortunately, for the movie it’s in. Why couldn’t Cemetery Man be about THIS guy? Sure, there would be less shirtless Rupert Everett to go around, but there’d also be less moping. Half-naked, sullen Rupert Everett or an awesome Death Puppet…choices, choices…

Written words (c) 2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: April 23^rd, 2010

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