A lackadaisical young man tends a cemetery where zombies routinely rise in 1994's Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). Rupert Everett stars in this bizarre Italian film that begins like a pleasantly sleazy giallo and becomes something much weirder, much more impressively surreal.
Francesco (Everett) tends the cemetery accompanied only by a big mute named Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). Francesco's a crack shot and is accustomed to lazily shooting the occasional wandering zombie in the brain without giving it much thought.
One day, he falls for a beautiful young widow he sees attending a funeral. She's played by the beautiful Anna Falchi, of whom we see quite a lot in this film, by which I mean both that she's naked a lot and she plays multiple roles. Indeed, she seems to take on a supernatural life as the embodiment of Francesco's conception of a desirable woman.
Gnaghi has a love interest, too, the disembodied head of the mayor's daughter. Like a lot of points in the film, it feels like the screenwriter intentionally swerved at the last minute before making a coherent political statement.
Eventually, as Francesco becomes thoroughly desensitised to killing, the world around him becomes increasingly inexplicable. Martin Scorsese named it one of the best Italian movies of the '90s and I can see why. It just gets better and better.
Cemetery Man is available on Shudder.
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