Top Movies #21

Cemetery Man (1994)

“The Living Dead and the dying living are all the same. Cut from the same cloth. But disposing of dead people is a public service, where as you're in all sorts of trouble if you kill someone while they're still alive.” – Francesco Dellamorte

The film’s Italian title is Dellamorte Dellamore, which translates to “Of Death, of Love.” This is a far more appropriate film title because the interrelationship of these two topics is precisely what the film is about. Michele Soavi’s film may look like a zombie movie peripherally, but I sense that many resistant viewers will find themselves unexpectedly liking this film; that is, if they can stomach it. Soavi’s opus features busloads (literally) of mutilated school children reanimating and being retired by cemetery caretaker Francesco Dellamorte. Castrations, beheadings, murders, and other inventive carnage litter this creative gem.

Underneath the gore-tacular exterior, one finds a fantastically thought-provoking film. Dellamorte mediates his ever-evolving philosophises about the meaning of life, death, and love. His thoughts are really very beautiful, profound, and challenging. It is equivalent to listening to good poetry. And I guess questions naturally arise when one spends more time with the dead than they do with the living.

The film is also very funny, due in large part to the career-making performance of Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte. He has just the right blend of serious charm and sly caricature, which allows him to get away with saying things like: “I’d give me life to be dead,” or “They thought their life was ahead of them, but in fact it had already passed them by.”

Dellamorte is watchman over an enchanted cemetery: a cemetery where the recently-buried come back from the dead. It is Dellamorte’s fate to put these souls back in the ground. An old lady who frequents the cemetery insists upon calling Dellamorte “Engineer.” He corrects her, but the moniker lingers with us. Dellamorte seeks control over his cemetery, first, and then later he seeks control over love and life itself. When the most beautiful woman he has ever seen dies in a freak accident, he awaits her reanimation in his cemetery. Only she keeps coming back, and not just undead, but very much alive. Each of the new incarnations have progressively grotesque demands of Dellamorte, and each time he is faced with rueful disappointment. It is a curious parable. To what I am not sure. The ending suggests that Dellamorte may be more prophetic than he realizes, and the line between life and death, love and pain, loses definition.

Cemetery Man is entertaining proof that horror movies can be artsy and intelligent, as well as blood-soaked.