 | I've had this movie for ages, just hadn't got round to seeing it until a few nights back, to my shame. What an excellent darkly comic piece of Italian zombie horror. Known as Dellamorte Dellamore, in Italy, it's one of best films I've seen Rupert Everett in, as he delivers subtlety sardonic dead-pan line after another. Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte a caretaker of a cemetery in a small Italian town, along with his assistant Gnaghi. Their easy life at the cemetery is thrown into turmoil, as the the dead start to rise up seven days after they have been buried. Dellamorte who loves to read the telephone directory, and cross out the names of the dead does his best to keep a lid on the "returners" wandering around the cemetery at night. Treating the zombies as a minor inconvenience to his generally easy life. As a "zombie" movie, the zombies are a minor part of Cemetery Man, as the main theme although being one of "resurrection", it's thematically wider than a simple zombie movie. As is explores recurring love, impotency (or lack of), and life and death. |
The movie is based on the 1991 novel by Tiziano Sclavi, which in turn was the blueprint for his well known comic book series Dylan Dog. The character of Francesco Dellamorte is very similar to the comic book character of Dylan Dog, and did appear in a Dylan Dog comic book called Falling Stars. The character Everett plays in the movie is an amalgam of both characters from the comic book series.
| Much has been said about the choice of calling the movie "Cemetery Man", in English, in that it misrepresents the themes of the story that the original Italian title Dellamorte Dellamore play with. Using the antonyms of "death" and "love", that are at the same time one letter away from being homonyms. Thus tying closely together two of major themes of the movie, of love and death. And even with the tag-line "Zombies, Guns And Sex, Oh My!" The English advertising for the movie misrepresents it's true greatness. | |
