First, Dellamorte Dellamore is a much better title for a movie than Cemetery Man, which is how it went out in English speaking countries in 1994. Cemetery Man suggests something slasher-inspired, maybe. Dellamorte Dellamore, and its literal translation, Of Death, Of Love, something much more gothic and weird. And that’s exactly what this mad piece of super-cultish garage grindcore is.
It’s Italian, who are good at weird, and is based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore by Tiziano Sciavi. Sciavi had based his main character in an earlier work, the comicbook Dylan Dog, on the actor Rupert Everett (specifically the listlessly upper-class Rupert Everett character in Another Country) and so when it came time to cast Dellamorte Dellamore, which owes something to Dylan Dog, Everett got the call.
He does a great job as the semi-disengaged cemetery supervisor whose job is to consign back whence they came the zombie undead who periodically escape from their freshly occupied graves. And, aided by a subaltern sidekick called Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), who can only utter the word “Gna”, that’s exactly what the two men do, with a pickaxe, shovel, gun, sword, or hastily re-appropriated crucifix yanked from the ground.
All is good until Francesco Dellamorte (Everett) falls hard for the spectacularly beautiful widow of a recently buried old man, but gets nowhere with her until he, tongue-tied and with nothing else to say, mumbles something about the cemetery’s ossuary, which he offers to show her. She lights up. “You know,” she says while visiting it shortly afterwards, and staring straight into his eyes through her black veil, “you have a real nice ossuary.” Titter ye not, as the comedian Frankie Howerd used to say.
From here, urgent, rampant sex, naked cavorting on top of the grave of the husband of the woman known only as She, with Anna Falchi demonstrating that she’s really obviously mammalian and Everett doing his best to keep up with an Olympian display of athletic, erotic writhing.
It’s funny, and it’s meant to be. One of the spectacular successes of this complete one-off is the way it weaves humour through the sexy and ghoulish stuff. Some of the comedy is straightforwardly innuendo-driven (that nice ossuary), some of it is the humour of juxtaposition (blowing off zombies’ heads while idly doing something else). But other stuff is more elaborate, like the blithely lax investigative attitude of the local cop Straneiro (Mickey Knox), who starts turning up regularly after Dellamorte extends his scope to out in the wider world, where innocent people are suddenly being blown to bits for no discernible reason.
There’s a detached head inside a TV set, a penisectomy, a mass motor-vehicle accident, zombies riding out of their graves on motorbikes and several different characters played by Falchi, all of whom want to jump Dellamorte’s bones (sometimes specifically his bones). Plus vomit as a love token.
It’s a wild story rendered onto the screen in a wild way by director Michele Soavi, who for all the excess doesn’t neglect the technicals. This is a great-looking film, shot clean and sharp by Mauro Marchetti (who worked alongside Vittorio Storare on Apocalypse Now), the editing (Franco Fraticelli) is propulsive, the special make-up (Gino Zamprioli) is very effective. At one point, back from the dead, She, semi-rotten, starts clambering all over Dellamorte, for one last bang, and it’s both erotic and digusting.
The dubbing lets it down a bit and accentuates the film’s only real negative – its abrupt, non-sequitur throughline, though “throughline” is dignifying this lucky dip of plot points.
Dellamorte Dellamore may be schlock but it’s never dull. The casting is on the nose, with Everett particularly good as Dellamorte, Hadji-Lazaro also excellent as the monosyllabic Gnaghi, the Igor to Dellamorte’s Frankenstein (though Igor never gets a love plot). Falchi, dressed and undressed, gives it her all, and there’s plenty to give.
But then that is the tone of it – excess. It makes Hollywood horror movies look po-faced. And British horror movies (which it is closer to in its gothic leanings) as seriously short of imagination.
Dellamorte Dellamore aka Cemetery Man – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
