Review of Cemetery Man (1994) by Addison P — 26 Jun 2008

This is the most criminally underseen movie of all time. Its a rare thing to find a movie which uses bats on visible strings and makes allusions to paintings by Rene Margritte(the kiss in the crypt resembles Margritte's "The Lovers"), and have talkin...(read more)g zomibe heads, but here it is-and in English.

Rupert Everertt delivers a great performance as the caretaker for a cemetary in a small Italian village, where the dead once buried there come back to life, and every evening without fail, he kills them and buries them again. Of course no one will listen to him, and killing the zombies becomes more a matter of maintnance than survival. Against this backdrop of casual zombie killing, comes a love interest, into our protagonists life, a beuatiful woman who will appear and then die, and then appear again, rising like the dead from cemetary. And speaking of things which rise from the grave, our hero is completely impotent, a fact everyone in town knows and taunts him about. The film goes on to subtly discuss, death, love, sex, buerocracy, divisions of labour, obsession, reality, and the literal ends of the earth. Theres also plenty of zombie gore, sex, vomit, and decapitated heads. This movie is too smart for most of the zombie crowd, and has too much projectile vomit for much of the art house fans, but then there are those for whome this film wil be just right. Not to mention Micheal Savoi's direction, which is as good as Gilliam or Ridley Scott in his techincal Blade Runner days. Every shot is framed to give it a sense of visual flourish, and it's a shame Savoi never made anything nearly this ambitious again. The story is based on an Italian comic book called Dylan Dogg(which hasnt been translated, into English yet, but of which Ive heard great things.), and "Cemetary Man" is it's American release title, orignally it was "Dellamorte Dellamore" which means roughly "Of Love, Of Death" and is a play on words as our heroe's fathers last name Dellamorte, while his mothers was Dellamore. A fascinating, funny, gory, smart, mindf*&k of a film, that should be seen by all fans of zombie movies, tricky cinematography, art films, and movies in general. Up there with "Dawn Of The Dead", and "Dead Alive", this stands as on an essential, if unknown part of the Zombie cannon, this is about as close it's come to literature.