Cemetery Man AKA Dellamorte Dellamore
(1994) 105 min.
Rated: R (Gore, sex & nudity)
Country: Italy, France, Germany
Director: Michele Soavi
Starring: Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A lonely cemetery man fights off zombies and pines for the one woman who seems to keep reappearing in his life.
Synopsis:
Francesco Dellamorte (Everett) is the groundskeeper at a cemetery in the small Italian village of Buffalora. Every night he has to fight off the newly buried as they seem to return to life as zombies. With him lives his partially mute and dim-witted companion Gnaghi (Hadji-Lazaro) who helps to dig the burial plots and fend off zombies during the night if need be. Gnaghi behaves in a childlike way and can only say the word “gna”.
One day Francesco sees a beautiful woman (Falchi) at a funeral. He can’t seem to get her out of his mind. Soon he sees her again at the grave site. He mistakenly thinks that she was the man’s daughter, but she corrects him and tells Francesco that she was his wife. Francesco assures her that she will get over the pain of losing him and she leaves in an angrily.
She comes again to the cemetery and Francesco apologizes to her. He boasts about the cemetery’s ossuary which she takes great interest in. They both visit the wet ossuary and kiss. She gets frightened of her own response to his advances and runs outside. In the moonlight she turns to him and they continue to kiss and make love on the grave of her dead husband.
As they have sex, the woman’s husband rises from the grave and bites her. Francesco kills the zombie. A coroner pronounces her dead of a heart attack, so Francesco stays with the body, which rises again. He shoots it in the head and she dies.
Francesco takes Gnaghi into town for ice cream and he throws up on the mayor’s daughter, Valentina. She gets on the back of a boy named Claudio’s bike and they go for a joyride. They crash into a large bus.
Many people died as a result of the crash. That night a few zombies come back to life and Frencesco and Gnaghi have to kill them again. Of the many deaths, Valentina is one. When Gnaghi goes to cover her grave instead he removes her head, which is now reanimated and talks to him. Gnaghi now begins a child-like romance between himself and Valentina’s head.
The next night the widow Francesco killed earlier, comes back to life and tries to kill him. He manages to kill her again, but feels great regret at killing the only woman he’s ever loved and not killing her properly before. Death appears before Francesco and tells him to stop killing the dead. He instructs Francesco to kill the living instead.
He ignores Death, and continues to kill zombies, but he also dreams of killing the youths that stand in the village square and mock him. It turns out that they really did die, just like in his dream with the killer still on the loose.
The mayor finds his daughter’s body is headless, and finds her head in Gnaghi’s room. Valentina tells her father that she wants to marry Gnaghi and when her father refuses, she attacks him, biting him and killing him. Francesco in turn shoots Valentina in the head. Gnaghi is heartbroken over her death.
The next day he meets another woman who looks exactly like the widow (also played by Falchi). She instantly falls for him telling him she feels like she’s known him and loved him before. She also tells him that she can only love an impotent man and has a phobia of erections. Francesco decides to have his penis removed and speaks to a doctor who instead convinces him to have an injection to prevent his erections temporarily. Francesco agrees to this.
The woman returns to Francesco and tells him that the Mayor raped her, but that she ended up liking it afterwards and had sex with him again. She’s decided to marry the mayor instead of him. After being rejected, Francesco goes into a depression and starts driving the streets at night.
While out drinking he meets two girls Magda and Lola. Lola looks exactly like the widow (played by Falchi). He decides to take them to their flat. He has sex with Lola a few times and when he gets up to get a drink Magda tells him that he must pay her. Francesco angrily puts an electric heater next to the sleeping Laura. The apartment catches on fire, presumably killing the girls inside.
The next day Francesco hears that another man he knows is in a coma and being charged with his crime. He goes to the hospital and kills a few doctors and nurses, still being ignored for the crimes he’s committing and fully frustrated with the world.
He decides to pack up and head out of Buffalora with Gnaghi. They leave the village and drive into a tunnel. As the reach the other end, Francesco slams on the breaks of the car. This causes Gnaghi to get a gash on his head and he stumbles out of the car and passes out. Francesco realized that the road ends in a deep chasm. He pulls out a gun to kill them both, but is unable to bring himself to shoot Gnaghi. Gnaghi wakes up, throws the gun away into the chasm. He asks Francesco if he can be driven back home, to which Francesco replies “gna”.
Review:
I saw this movie many years ago as a young teenager. I vaguely remembered it then, but seeing it now again I can’t say that I really learned much more than in my initial viewing. I can somewhat understand why this film retains a kind of cult status. It’s a black comedy that parallels love and death. In a way Francesco and Gnaghi seem to learn that the only thing they have for certain is each other.
The oppressive nature of small rural villages is played out well here. Where everyone in town knows your name and what you do as well as all the gossip that surrounds you. It’s quite interesting to see that facet of humans.
The ambiguous nature of the ending which leads almost directly in a cycle is also amusing.
What bothers me a bit is the usage of She merely a prop for the protagonist to reach an epiphany. She gets no name, is used a fair amount of times and is killed about four times. It’s kind of crazy, but then the entire movie kind of is crazy.