Today’s film is a favorite of mine, all the more so for its being a completely unexpected find. It’s called Cemetery Man–also known as Della’morte Dell’amore–and it’s got zombie nuns, serial killers, Hitchcockian doppelgangers, direct swipes from Rene Magritte, existentialist angst, surrealist plot construction, inventive and entertaining gore, and beautiful naked people. In other words, how could it not be one of my favorites?
Directed by Dario Argento protege Michele Soavi, this Italian-made 1994 film (it was shot in English, but the Italian-standard post-sync sound still gives it an odd dubbed look) stars, get this, Rupert Everett. Yes, that Rupert Everett–My Best Friend’s Wedding, Madonna’s ersatz girlfriend for a while. What is he doing in a low-budget Italian zombie movie? God only knows, but he’s doing it really well. Everett stars as Francesco Della’morte, the aptly surnamed (it means “of death”) caretaker of Buffalora Cemetery. Ground down to a little nub of cynicism and washboard abs by years of working with nothing but corpses and a mute manservant named Gnaghi, Della’morte spends his days burying the dead and his nights re-killing them, as some unnamed epidemic has taken hold in his cemetery, re-animating the dead by the seventh day after their death. From the very first scene, it’s clear that Della’morte sees this bizarre and gruesome task as just another part of his workaday existence–to report it would mean losing his job, to say nothing of the mountains of paperwork involved.
Things change for our gruff, sexy, perpetually five-o’clock-shadowed anti-hero when a beautiful young widow, played by the almost comically lovely Anna Falchi, passes through the graveyard to bury her late husband, a much older man. Turns out the widow has something of a thing for death, which Della’morte plays to his advantage, and then, unfortunately for everyone, to his disadvantage. How? Well, let’s just say having sex with someone atop her husband’s grave in a cemetery where the dead routinely come back to life is maybe a bad idea. I won’t say anymore–this film is so unique, and so filmic, that I don’t want to spoil it for you. But suffice it to say that this movie starts as one thing, becomes three or four other things, and ends up as something entirely unexpected and deeply, deeply haunting.
Not something you expect from an Italian zombie flick, huh?
I myself was lucky enough to pick it up sight-unseen at the recommendation of the clerk at the local cult-movie video store back at Yale (before the University moved a Blockbuster in down the street and put the place out of business). I took it home, stuck it in the common-room VCR, and sat enthralled with half my roommates as this movie, utterly unlike anything I’d ever seen before, played out. “Wow,” said my pre-med housemate upon its conclusion, “what a movie–that had something for everybody!” And indeed it does. The film’s sense of humor shines through even in its bleakest and grossest moments, and is as deadpan as it wanna be: Says a doctor at one point to Della’morte, who for reasons I’ll avoid getting into is seeking a fairly radical bit of sex therapy, “Please don’t make me cut it off. Today, I’m… just not up for it.” There’s broad but vicious satire of contemporary mores, both political (“Vote For A Man Who Has Lost All Other Happiness” is proposed as an hysterically exploitative campaign slogan by the town’s mayor, whose daughter has just been decapitated in a motorcycle accident) and sexual (“Mind your business,” yells a love-struck young woman when Della’morte interrupts her post-mortem reunion with her dead boyfriend, “I can be eaten by whomever I please.”). The performances are note-perfect all around, and Everett and Falchi imbue their roles with a kind of nihilistic glamour, like a grand guignol Belmondo and Seberg. Moreover, the two leads are genuinely glorious specimens of humanity; you see quite a bit of them, and they give their sex scenes a genuine paraphiliac chemistry. Indeed, the whole movie is like paraphilia in film form–instead of channelling sexual energy into fetishes, the movie channels horror into comedy, comedy into erotica, erotica into romance, romance into slapstick, slapstick into tragedy, tragedy into gore, gore into high art, high art into pulp, pulp into philosophy. It bridges the gap between film grad students, comic-book geeks and horny teenagers by referencing cult favorites both silly (The Three Stooges) , sinister (the whole zombie-flick pantheon), and sublime (Magritte). And the ending–nope, not another word out of me, just that it’s metaphor writ large, and it’s genuinely fascinating to see.
Oh, and did I mention the zombie Boy Scouts? Damn, this is a good movie.