Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)

Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore (released under the much more prosaic title Cemetery Man in the U.S.) is a zombie movie. Now I have to say upfront that I am not a fan of zombie movies. There are some exceptions. I absolutely adore movies dealing with voodoo. Those types of zombie movies I like. And I love Jean Rollin’s zombie movies but Rollin’s zombie movies are very very unconventional zombie movies. But the zombie movies that started to become so poplar in the wake of Night of the Living Dead, the movies about shambling flesh-eating zombies, hold no appeal for me.

Michele Soavi is however a director with interesting credentials. He was a protégé of Dario Argento, working on many of Argento’s movies in the 80s and early 90s. He is often spoken of as a director with at least some of Argento’s visual flair.

And Dellamorte Dellamore has the reputation of being an unusual zombie movie. A kind of black comedy zombie movie but with a bit of philosophical heft to it as well, and a certain amount of eroticism. So, given that I’ve had Anchor Bay’s DVD release of this movie siting unwatched on my shelf for literally years it seemed like it might be worth actually sitting down and watching it.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the caretaker at a small cemetery. It’s not such a bad job really. It suits him. He’s not really a very sociable guy. Recently some slightly disturbing things have been happening at the cemetery. Some of the dead, after seven days, have started coming back to life. Well perhaps not quite back to life. They’re zombies. They’re not too much of a problem. If you shoot them they go back to being dead and they stay dead.

Francesco is vaguely aware that he ought to report the matter to the relevant authorities. The trouble is that that would involve writing reports and filling in forms and all sorts of bureaucratic hassles. It might even put his job at risk. The easiest thing to do is to just shoot the zombies and rebury them and say no more about it. Francesco is a guy who doesn’t like to make his life more complicated than it needs to be.

Then comes the day when he spots a gorgeous young woman (played by Anna Falchi) at a funeral. It’s the funeral of an elderly man. Francesco assumes it’s the young woman’s father but she informs him that the man was actually her husband. She then goes on to tell Francesco how her husband was incredibly good in bed, a skilful and tireless lover. She’s obviously missing his physical attentions. So her behaviour is slightly odd but Francesco doesn’t let that worry him. Grief does strange things to people. What matters to Francesco is that she’s totally gorgeous and he wants to sleep with her more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life.

This seems like an unattainable goal, unto, the day he mentions in passing that the cemetery has a fine ossuary. A building filled with assorted skeletal remains. She is very very anxious to see the ossuary. It excites her very much indeed. In fact it gets her incredibly hot. Maybe making love on her husband’s grave might seem insensitive but she assures Francesco that she has never had any secrets from her husband.

From this point on the movie gets progressively stranger. For a while it tries being a horror film. Then it tries black comedy. Then it tries adolescent existentialism. The zombie thing kind of gets forgotten. Maybe none of it is real anyway. It’s more like a crazy hallucinogenic dream. There’s lots of gore and some genuinely disgusting gross-out moments. I think the director is trying to be zany. The sad thing is that the crazier the movie gets the less interesting it gets. Instead of the inspired lunacy which Soavi was presumably shooting for we get an incoherent mess.

And once we decide that none of it can be real then there’s no reason to care what happens next. Maybe Francesco is really suffering. Maybe he’s just insane.

The first time Francesco shoots a living person instead of a zombie, by mistake, it has a certain shock value. Then he just keeps shooting people for no reason.

As a comedy it didn’t work at all for me. Comedy is a very individual thing and maybe this is just not the kind of comedy that appeals to me. As horror it doesn’t work because it’s too farcical and it’s impossible to feel any terror or suspense or shock. As an exercise in absurdism it falls flat because it’s too silly and cartoonish.

There are a few good visual moments early on. For the first half hour the movie has an interesting off-kilter vibe. It just ends up (to my way of thinking) trying to do too many things and trying to be too many things.

Lots of people really like this movie. I can’t really recommend it but I’m not going to advise you to avoid it because it might really work for you. Most people seem to like this movie a lot more than I did.

It just didn’t work for me.