Main cast: Rupert Everett (Francesco Dellamorte), François Hadji-Lazaro (Gnaghi), Anna Falchi (The Woman), Mickey Knox (Marshall Straniero), Anton Alexander (Franco), Fabiana Formica (Valentina Scanarotti), Clive Riche (Dr Vercesi), and Stefano Masciarelli (Mayor Scanarotti)
Director: Michele Soavi
Michele Soavi was one of the key players of Italian horror cinema in the 1980s, but his contribution was more in screenwriting and some acting spots here and there. Perhaps ironically, his greatest critically acclaimed work happens to be something that appears and is marketed as horror, but is actually something that defies easy categorization. That will be Dellamorte Dellamore.
In the grand tradition of Italian horror imports, it has a few English titles, but perhaps the most well known one is The Cemetery Man.
It’d be tantamount to cheating, in a way, for me to give a spoiler-free synopsis of this movie, because the movie changes direction and even story focus in what seems like every 15 minutes. The middle and the final thirds of the movie are nothing like the first third of the movie, let me just say.
Still, I suppose I should try to give one anyway, so do keep in the mind that my synopsis will cover happenings in the first third of the movie. After that, the rails are completely off, and I am not being hyperbolic here!
The character in the title refers to cemetery caretaker Francesco Dellamorte. He lives in the town of Buffalora, and it’s not a bad place to live… if one doesn’t count that the dead rises every night, and Francesco is a pro by now by dead-ing them back with his pistol.
Francesco could request for resources and assistance from the town council, but he can’t read or write, so he feels that it’s more efficient to just shoot the zombies instead of filing paperwork.
In the meantime, he shares his cozy, if somewhat rundown, hovel with his mentally not-quite-together assistant Gnaghi, whose running shtick in this movie is that he only utters one word: “Gna!”
One day, he falls in love with a woman, who is never identified by name in this movie, when she comes to the cemetery to see her husband buried…
That’s how this movie was marketed when it first came out—a zombie movie and a love story—so imagine my reaction when I first sat down in the cinema back then and find myself wondering just what I was looking at. I was led by the trailer to expect something else than what I actually get here.
Well, what one can get in this movie is something that follows closely to the typical style and aesthetics of Italian horror: beautifully staged scenes that makes the most out of angles, lighting, and colors as well as a tendency for the people behind the movie to go for big moments that will linger in people’s mind, even if such moments may not make sense. Then again, looking at the works of Mr Soavi’s contemporaries, Italian horror cinema is not something that is laden with logic, so this movie isn’t exactly going against the grain here.
However, the apparent lack of logic in this movie actually makes sense when one reaches the final scene and think back about the entire movie.
While I won’t get into that twist here, let me just say that I didn’t fully appreciate the movie in my first viewing. I felt somewhat cheated by the trailer and the marketing materials, so I wasn’t in the right place, so to speak, to appreciate this movie.
However, this movie also features Rupert Everett in his peak hotness, as he saunters around showing a lot of skin here and there, so I always have a reason to watch this thing again, and over time, I realize that this whole thing isn’t a zombie film, a love story, or whatever the marketing people scrambled to sell this movie as back in those days.
It’s one big metaphor. The horror movie elements are just wrappings like the towel that hangs low from Francesco’s hips. The most obvious interpretation would be that the zombies are Francesco’s personal demons as he tries to make sense of his existence, and eventually, he is driven to look for a new life, something better, only to find a dead end instead.
Even if I didn’t want to get all arty-farty here, this movie remains an interesting bag of oddities, as it offers necrophilia, vore fantasies, homicide, rape, chemical emasculation, and more. These elements are thrown in in a manner that is perversely bizarre and even comical, but never boring, so much so that one can watch this movie for the scenes, even if the overarching story makes little sense to them.
Well, that or watch it for Mr Everett, because from his towel-wrapped hips to his bare rump, that man is never more beautiful here.
Dellamorte Dellamore is definitely going to be a polarizing movie, but it can be a darkly comical, often macabre and ultimately bittersweet movie. It’s not really a horror movie in its heart and soul, but that’s not a complaint. Whatever this movie may be to different people, it’s going to be an unforgettable experience for most of them.
