Every so often, I’ll go looking over my streaming services and find a real oddity that just provokes my curiosity. Take the Italian horror-comedy Cemetery Man. I know it’s something of a cult classic, the sort of weird movie that may not get a huge audience but does have a devoted fanbase of its own. I had heard of it largely by its reputation, and it is oddly enough on my Fill-In Filmography poster. It’s just a movie about a guy who works in a cemetery that has a little issue in that corpses keep coming back to life, and he’s basically the only thing keeping them from running amok all over the place.
Yeah, I found it on AMC+, probably part of Shudder. All kinds of weird horror movies end up on Shudder eventually.
Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the caretaker of an Italian cemetery with an interesting problem: seven days after they’ve died, the dead come back as flesh-eating zombies. Mostly. Sometimes they come back early. Sometimes they’re still somewhat intelligent. All Francesco knows is he needs to split their heads open (dum dum bullets in a revolver work best, but any method is fine) to make them die and stay dead. Then he has to bury them again. His only help is his assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), a simple man with a child-like demeanor who seems capable of only saying the word “gna,” like some sort of shorter, chubbier version of Hodor. The only other person who knows about what’s going on in the cemetery at night is Francesco’s only real friend, town clerk Franco (Anton Alexander). In the meantime, Francesco is basically tired of life, a man who seems dead the world for all practical purposes.
Then one day, he spots a young widow (Anna Falchi, referred to as “She” in the closing credits), and Francesco declares her to be the most beautiful living woman he’s ever seen, a nice line implying he’s seen more beautiful dead ones. Love has a way of enlivening the gloomy man, and he goes about courting the widow, something that seems a bit easy when all is said and done as she seems to find ossuaries a bit of a turn on. But life can’t be that simple for Francesco as he seems to be living in a town with a high death toll and a never-ending parade of zombies. Can he find something like happiness?
To start off, yes, this is a very weird movie. This is the sort of movie where a bus load of boy scouts and nuns will have a massive accident involving a small biker gang and the mayor’s teenage daughter that leaves everyone dead, the undead might just be in bed with Francesco, and sometimes he’ll find people that look exactly like other people that he knows are dead. When he does finally snap and targets the living himself, the local police think other people are responsible for his crimes to a comical level. Gnachi even takes the severed head of a dead girl home to be his girlfriend, and she seems to think that’s just fine because some of the undead can talk and some can’t, and this severed head is actually rather friendly to Gnachi. Bites along don’t make a person a “returner” as the movie calls them, but there are some really funny scenes involving some of the undead that Francesco has to take down. None of them seem particularly formidable to the guy, plus they seem to ignore Gnachi for whatever reason, but it is enough to make a man seem dead inside.
All of this is anchored by a pitch-perfect performance by Everett. All he really wants is for his life to get better, either with the unnamed woman of his dreams or else to just get out of town and not come back. Whatever happens seems to be on some sort of never-ending cycle. Sure, the mayor might die unexpectedly, but a new one will show up almost immediately, and people just can’t seem to stay away from the cemetery for whatever reason. Everett’s deadpan approach to whatever weirdness is happening is exactly what a movie like this needs, and while there are some moments that are real headscratchers in more ways the one–I am thinking mostly of the ending–I think this is the sort of movie that is worth a look, especially for those who like weird stuff. Just don’t go in expecting explanations. It’s not the kind of movie that really offers any.
Grade: B+
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