Dellamorte Dellamore (aka. Cemetery Man) (1994) – Review

For a good couple of decades, Italy was a powerhouse of the horror genre, pumping out both staggering innovation and derivative trash in equal measure. Filmmakers as diverse as Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Joe D’Amato, Ruggero Deodato and many others delivered everything from cutting edge giallo and taboo busting gore, to some of the most hilariously batshit rip-offs of Hollywood movies your brain could ever hope to achieve. However, these days, aside from the occasional splutter, the Italian horror industry is only a shadow of its former self despite being a defining force with many, modern filmmakers.
However, before it wheezed it’s last, in 1994 the Italians managed to get one last classic movie out that stands as one of the most trippiest horror flicks released and served as a fitting farewell to an entire era. Of course, there’s no surprise that it came from Michele Soavi…

Everybody who has ever worked a job knows how alienating it can be if you can’t decompress between shifts, but for Francesco Dellamorte it’s extra strenuous. You see, when the swaggering, cigarette puffing cemetary caretaker isn’t digging graves with his mentally disabled assistant, Gnaghi, he’s making sure the dead stay in their graves, because when the sun go down, the recently buried have a strange habit of rising from the dead within seven days of passing away. However, even this has soured for the increasingly despondent Dellamorte who tries to balance spending virtually all his time with the dead with his hobbies of reading old phone directories and ignoring the town’s rumours that he’s impotent.
However, just after the town’s latest funeral, Dellamorte meets a young widow whose elderly husband has just kicked the bucket and he is immediately obsessed by her beauty and actually manages to lure her into a steamy relationship which is tragically cut short when her late husband rises from the dead and bites her. Her subsequent death is attributed to heart failure which is further complicated when Dellamorte shoots her in the head when she rises, but this tragedy seems to accelerate his depression and alienation as the bizarre occurrences become ever more rapid. But when Dellamorte isn’t having to exterminate a bus full of dead boy scouts, chase a zombie biker around his cemetery and watch Gnaghi start a romance with the resurrected head of the mayor’s daughter, the morose gravedigger finds himself conversing with the Angel of Death itself who angrily suggests that he try killing the living instead of murdering the dead.
However, most disconcerting of all is that Dellamorte keeps meeting different women who all look exactly like the deceased widow he was obsessed with and his attempts to woo them all seem to end in disaster. Is life truly getting weirder by the day, or is Dellamorte’s crippling loneliness making him crack up in increasingly violent ways?

While Dellamorte Dellamore (also known as the far clunkier Cemetery Man) may have been the final farewell for the world of crazed Italian horror, it’s safe to say that the genre had never seen anything quite like what Soavi presented to us. It’s partly an amalgamation of Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, David Lynch and Lucio Fulci – but it’s simultaneously none of those and while it drifts from a zombie comedy akin to Braindead, it’s final third drifts into more confounding areas that start to feel a little like the ending of American Psycho. However, while those hoping for more easily processable thrills may find Dellamorte Dellamore a bit too slippery to grasp, it’s still one of the most beguiling movies out of Italy during the entirety of the 90s.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a shock as Michele Soavi is responsible for one of the most stunningly histrionic slasher movies ever made with 1987s magnificently diva-ish Stagefright – but as amazing as the visuals are for a stalk and slash flick that sees an owl-masked killer flamboyantly hunt the members of a dance troupe through a locked theatre, Soavi’s last horror flick somehow manages to beat it into second place with a handsome production that whips out a jaw-unhinging shot seemingly every four minutes. We have burnt papers swirling out of a bonfire to form a huge, winged and decidedly pissed Grim Reaper, we have an impassively featured Rupert Everett framed by the discarded wings of a statue that make him look like an angel and we even have a POV shot from inside a zombies mouth as it lunges across the room at a victim.

But this isn’t even the tip of the over the top iceberg as we have a zombie biker buried with his vehicle of choice exploding from the grave to tear about the place on his hog like Meatloaf in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the near mute Gnaghi placing the zombie head heads fallen in love with in a busted TV set to keep her safe and a cracking Dellamorte impatiently shooting a string of hospital staff as they keep continously interrupting a conversation.
However, holding all this lavish eccentricity together is Everett’s wonderfully deadpan performance that sees a man so warped with depression, that he can blow a bunch of zombies away out of hand, but still sees that nihilistic resolve implode when a chance of love rears it’s head. It’s here where our suspicions about whether or not what Dellamorte is actually experiencing is actually real as Anna Falchi charscter (named as “She” in the credits) seems to keep coming back to him in different forms only to have him act out in overexagerated ways. In her first incarnation, she shares in extremely steamy sex scene with Everret (on a tomb, naturally) only to die and be resurrected. The second has her turn up as a secretary with a phobia of penises and so the ever overreacting Dellamorte goes to the doctor to have his dick removed (thankfully the doctor chickens out a pumps him full of impotent juice instead). It’s quite an achievement that one of the most memorable scenes in a horror/comedy/fantasy involves the sight of a man in stirrups while a doctor advances on his member with a huge syringe when there’s zombies staggering around with tree roots embedded in their faces, but there you go.
However, while it’s all whacky fun and games for the most part, Soavi takes things into even stranger territory with the final third of the film which goes into full surrealism to suggest that none of this zombie-based fuckery is actually happening and that the isolation of being an illiterate, aloof, grave digger who everyone in town openly mocks has caused for him to lose his mind. Predating Patrick Bateman’s sweaty, last act confession by nearly six years, we see Everett desperately try to own up to murders he’s obviously committed only to be comically  ignored by police; but before we can get a handle on what Soavi is trying to tell us about the nature of loneliness and mental illness, he flips the script again into the realms of the abstract with a final ten minutes that will either have you utterly enraptured or angrily frustrated.

A winningly weird, true original, there hasn’t been anything quite like Dellamorte Dellamore as it mischievously sprawls between the realms of slapstick zombie slayer and arthouse fantasy like the entwined bodies of Dellamorte and She as they indulge their carnal fantasises on her husband’s grave. It’s silly, it’s profound, it’s romantic, it absurd. It’s one of the greatest genre pieces to come out of Italy and it was one of the last.
What a way to bow out.
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