A rollicking good time that doesn’t care one what about visual excess or maximum gore, Cemetery Man will entertain far more people than I presume would expect to enjoy it. Rupert Everett’s star qualities, finally made known to a broad audience since his killer turn in My Best Friend’s Wedding, are the perfect blend of smirkiness and swarthiness to hold together this tale of a graveyard attendant who is constantly, wearily assaulted by the corpses of people who just don’t feel like being dead. The buzz of Rupert’s doorbell usually signals the arrival of one such zombie, whom he promptly and even politely kills, then buries with the help of his mishmouthed, hunchback assistant Gnaghi. All in a day’s work for Rupert, whose name in this baroquely perverse film is Francesco Dellamore Dellamorte, which literally translates to “Francesco of Love, of Death.”
Cemetery keeper Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) already lives a creepy life among the gravestones with his loyal but half-witted assistant Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). But now the recently “interred” are rising from their graves within hours of burial. The only way Francesco can return them to stillness is to shoot them in the head or otherwise pierce their skulls with metal. Nobody will help him — the town officials expect him to keep mum if he wants to keep his job. Then Francesco falls in love with the girl of his dreams, who first appears as a voluptuous woman in black and avoids him until he mentions that he has an Ossuary to show her. Totally not at all creepy. Thus begins a bizarre and macabre love affair that makes simple necrophilia seem like the proverbial Sunday School Picnic.
Francesco’s Mad Love plays out amid carnage and grue. The lovers first declare themselves in the cemetery’s Ossuary, basically a dripping-wet covered pit full of long-decayed corpses. With her passing and subsequent returns (no spoilers, although she keeps coming back in various forms, like a self-generating hallucination) Francesco falls into an insane nightmare resembling H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator: The resurrected zombies are people he knew and loved. The same is true for Francois Hadji-Lazaro’s Gnaghi, the mentally handicapped but endearing gravedigger who stays madly in love with the Mayor’s daughter Valentina (Fabiana Formica), even though a violent motorcycle accident has reduced her to a severed head. Gnaghi’s TV has been smashed so he places the head in the broken cabinet so she can keep him company. It’s an oddball parody of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die.
Francesco is eventually driven off his rocker by various haunted doppelgangers of his beloved black widow. To please one of them he undergoes a literal emasculation, retracing the path of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney’s grotesque silent The Unknown. Mirroring the film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Francesco goes on a killing spree just so the law will end his misery. Yet the police chief refuses to consider him a suspect, no matter what he does. The final cosmic finale brings Cemetery Man to a philosophical dead end — or perhaps a riff on the theme of innocence from Citizen Kane.
What Cemetery Man doesn’t do is find a particularly gratifying way of tying up its plot strands or even its more admirably interesting themes, opting instead to sort of peter out into a bizarre ending that not many will likely appreciate. It also can’t be said that Cemetery Man exactly breaks new ground in cinematic technique, though jokes aside, the creepy score by Manuel De Sica and Riccardo Besio was hands down the best I heard in 1996, The English Patient and The Portrait of a Lady be damned. Besides, all things considered, Cemetery Man is a juicy sampler of comedy, sex (mmmm, Anna Falchi), outlandishly graphic ghost story, and adventurous genre-hopping aplomb. It’s a movie about spirits that won’t die, and except for in its flaccid last half-hour, the spirit of Soavi’s film doesn’t lag a bit, either.