Cemetery Man (1996) review

23. Cemetery Man (1996)

Directed by: Michele Soavi

Produced by: Tilde Corsi, Gianni Romoli, Michele Soavi

Screenplay by: Gianni Romoli

Starring: Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi

Okay, last Italian film of the month; well, it’s actually an Italian-French-German co-production, but whatever. This is “Cemetery Man,” originally titled “Of Death and Love,” based on the Tiziano Sclavi novel, and it’s probably one of the stranger supernatural movies of the 1990s. It’s about a cemetery caretaker named Francesco (Rupert Everett) who spends his time killing the dead that rise from their graves while also pining for his lost love (Anna Falchi); but there’s much…much more to it than that. I don’t even know if I’d call it a horror movie; it’s more like a surrealistic, black romantic comedy with a touch of existentialism. It really doesn’t make sense as a coherent narrative, but it has a neat visual style and some genuinely humorous traits.

Keep in mind, just summarizing the plot is complicated. Basically, Francesco and his mentally handicapped assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) live in a house at a cemetery, killing zombies that come from the graves; he calls them Returners. At a funeral, he falls in love with the widow of one of the deceased; she’s fascinated—and by that, I mean outrageously turned on—by the ossuary he shows her, full of death and decay, and it leads to them having sex atop the husband’s grave. But the husband rises and attacks her, and she dies in the struggle; Francesco becomes depressed, and starts seeing more women who look exactly like her. But he’s only left with desperate longing, and his mental state starts slipping as he goes to extreme lengths to recapture the bond they shared. Oh, and I didn’t even mention the fact that Gnaghi has a relationship with the decapitated head of the mayor’s Returner daughter Valentina (Fabiana Formica), the Grim Reaper himself appears to tell Francesco to kill the living instead, and the ongoing storyline of Francesco’s presumed impotence…still with me? Okay, let’s continue.

I like the general environment throughout the film; there’s no known explanation for why the dead rise, the mayor (Stefano Masciarelli) is more concerned with his re-election—he even tries to dig up his daughter’s corpse for a photo opportunity to garner sympathy from voters—and most of the characters are weirdly nonchalant about rather terrible situations. It’s just this strange, offbeat, almost spoofish mood that you’re not meant to take seriously…except when it does; then the movie starts to lose me. One thing that’s consistently good is the cinematography in the cemetery scenes; the film has a solid craft and sense of imagination, which really makes some of the abstract visuals stand out.

Rupert Everett plays Francesco with nerve-wracking body language; you really believe that this is a man just losing his grip on reality; his arc has similarities to James Stewart in “Vertigo.” The woman—whose name we never discover—is played by Finnish model Anna Falchi, who’s almost impossibly beautiful; it’s not difficult to see why Francesco would go love at first sight over her. One funny minor character is police Marshall Straniero (Micky Knox), who’s incredibly inept at solving his cases, while François Hadji-Lazaro is strangely endearing as Gnaghi. There are a lot of funny interactions, which is when the movie is at its most enjoyable, as well as when the tone goes kind of delightfully mean-spirited. However, there exists a misplaced sense of sincerity as it gets into the third act; the movie goes from a series of vaguely related occurrences to a veiled attempt at really being about something. But the storylines are far too jumbled, and the characters aside Francesco practically nonexistent in the grand scheme of things; the ending becomes this out-of-nowhere road trip to the end of the world, only to peter out to the apparent conclusion that life and death have no meaning. I have to admit that by now, I’m usually checked out.

“Cemetery Man” is certainly entertaining, if just to marvel at how random it is, or perhaps to gaze respectfully at its steamy sex scenes; seriously, Falchi is beyond gorgeous. But it has such a struggle for an identity; it’s not scary or gory, and the atmosphere is this odd mixture of comedic and dreary. It will leave you asking poignant questions, such as: is there such a difference between life and death? Can one’s sins ever truly be redeemed? What do you do when your friend is stealing your murders? Does love really exist between a large slobbering man and a decapitated head? Yeah, this movie is bonkers; I don’t really recommend it because it’s good, but because it’s unique. It comes nowhere near the zombie classics, but it’s kind of in its own special category; that alone makes it worth a watch.

My rating: 6.5/10