Review of Cemetery Man (1994) by Jean-Francois V — 07 Aug 2009

Francesco Dellamorte is the Buffy of Buffalora Cemetery, only he doesn't dust vampires, he splits open the brains of zombies, or "returners" as he calls them, and his sidekick is not a Jewish lesbian, but a grunting moron (François Hadji-Lazaro, the lead singer of the carnivorous French rock group Les Garcons Bouchers.) His boring, well-ordered life gets a bit messy though when loved ones start returning, and despair leads to massacres.

I can't believe I watched the whole thing (even with half my brain occupied elsewhere.) It started out rather well, as a decently shot film that tried to combine romantic imagery, slapstick and gore in a kind of necromantic comedy, set in an Italy where everybody speaks with a posh British accent. And there were some nice visual elements even in the latter part of the movie, such as the zombie scouts or the TV bit ("Oh my God, Valentina! What are you doing on TV?") But the film is a rather chaotic and episodic trip into nihilism, aiming at macabre surrealism, but falling into some sort of rather repellent necrophiliac teen angst.

Everett is quite good as the only professional actor in the film (though I had to overcome my deep disgust for him, after watching two of his in-your-face, sex-obsessed, exhibitionistic homosexual documentaries about Richard Burton and Byron as sex tourists.) The rest of the cast is at best decent, but often below average or even outright bad (the two teenage girls in particular were atrocious.).

The film also contains avoidable strong language, nudity, necrophilia, a lot of senseless violence and vulgarity and definitely anti-Catholic imagery: of the two nuns that are featured in the film, the first one is interpreted by a man (because nuns are that ugly) and the second one in shot in the face on a whim. Ha ha.

But more than anything, it's the pointlessness and the solipsistic absurdism of the thing that turned me off. I couldn't find much information on Tiziano Sclavi, the author of the original novel, except that he is the author of a comic book series called "Dylan Dog", which "defies the whole preceding horror tradition with a vein of surrealism and an anti-bourgeois rhetoric", and of which this is supposed to be an adaptation of sorts. One Italian article also says of him that he is "uno scrittore che unisce in una miscela esplosiva l'angoscia esistenziale di Gadda e la leggerezza di Calvino e Buzzati." All this combines to make "Dellamorte Dellamore" look like Sartre revisited by the early Peter Jackson.