Inspired equally by the labyrinthine narratives and bizarre psychosexual undercurrents pervading the Italian giallo and the often perverse blend of sex, death, and pitch-black humor found in many 1980s horror comedies, Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man nonetheless remains a singular enigma, operating by its own twisted logic and spiraling off in so many unexpected directions that it’s impossible to predict where it’s heading at any given moment. Its unusual fusion of sensuality and the macabre is introduced early on as our disaffected, alienated and self-declared impotent protagonist, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett)—who looks after the Buffalora cemetery with the help of the mute, lovable simpleton Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro)—instantly falls for an unnamed, recently widowed woman (Anna Falchi), who rebuffs him by detailing the sexual prowess of her significantly older deceased husband.
Dellamorte is soon able to seduce the grieving woman by showing her the cemetery’s ossuary—the first tipoff that the film is unafraid to dive headfirst into unseemly territory—leading to a lovemaking session on her husband’s grave, from which he soon rises from the dead to bite and infect his disloyal wife. But despite the danger, zombies are not viewed as much of a dire threat in Cemetery Man, but rather as a minor yet consistent inconvenience that Dellamorte and Gnaghi must take care of on a regular basis—a bloody, violent task that’s treated as no different than sweeping up leaves and cleaning gravestones.
At first glance, Cemetery Man may appear like just another zombie comedy, but it quickly begins to diverge into more existential terrain, delving into various forms of obsessive love and dissolving the boundaries between fantasy and reality, making it increasingly difficult to determine whether the events that unfold are the delusions of a loner, the genuine onset of the apocalypse or a warped portrait of a world where the living and the living dead are plagued by the very same doubts, fears and emotions.
Soavi doesn’t so much blur the line between life and death as make it almost nonexistent, and it’s through the strange ambiguity that emerges from this move that the film seamlessly traverses nightmarish visions, surreal dalliances awash in Gothic romanticism, madcap spurts of gore-filled violence and the mundane daily routines of maintaining the cemetery. As mysterious murders continue to occur and people begin disappearing, the town’s mayor (Stefano Masciarelli) remains singularly fixated on his re-election—even after his daughter falls victim to the killing—while the town’s head detective (Mickey Knox) is almost willfully blind to Dellamorte’s involvement in the mounting crimes.
The dissonance between the grisliness of the murders and the genuine indifference with which they’re met by members of the establishment is critical to how the world outside Dellamorte’s cemetery is presented. Yet within the walls of the cemetery, life (and the afterlife) is brimming with intense, conflicted emotions, carnal desire and, yes, even love that knows no bounds. A young woman (Katja Anton) mourning at the grave of her recently deceased biker boyfriend, Claudio (Alessandro Zamattio), gleefully runs off with him after he explodes through the ground riding the smashed motorcycle he was buried with, and when Dellamorte finds her soon after being chomped on by her bloodless beau, she screams at him, “Mind your business! I shall be eaten by whoever I please!”
The lack of boundaries extends not only to corporeal oddities—such as Gnaghi’s love interest being the reanimated severed head of the mayor’s daughter (Fabiana Formica), a pairing that makes for a surprisingly touching and hilarious subplot—but to reality itself. While Dellamorte initially loses his beloved young widow, she continues to return in various states, reconsecrating their love before meeting a tragic fate time and again. What began as a more clearly defined, bifurcated reality between the town and the cemetery (and the living and the dead, of course) is completely shattered in the film’s final act. If Dellamorte was already questioning the meaning of existence, wondering what exactly exists outside of the self-imposed bubble he keeps himself trapped in, Cemetery Man’s finale boldly serves up an answer that punctures both Dellamorte and the viewer’s conceptions of the film’s reality. Notions of eternal recurrence come into play in yet another of the film’s wild yet expertly executed shifts, but for all Cemetery Man’s incessant toying with genre, narrative expectations and tonal variations, it remains firmly grounded by a ghoulish humor and engrossing emotional throughline that prevents the film from ever feeling unwieldy even as it remains in a near-constant state of change all the way to the bitter end.
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