Saturday, August 13, 2011

bad/awesome flixxx review: Cemetery Man (1994)



"I can't forgive myself for having lied to you. I don't have a degree in biology. Never even finished high school. I haven't read more than two books in my whole life. One, never finished. And the other is the phone book."- Francesco Dellamorte

"The Living Dead and the dying living are all the same. Cut from the same cloth. But disposing of dead people is a public service, whereas you're in all sorts of trouble if you kill someone while they're still alive."- Francesco Dellamorte

"I should have known it. The rest of the world doesn't exist."- Francesco Dellamorte

A very strange Italian zombie flick. In Italy its title is DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, which means Death Love. There are a lot of Italian zombie movies, and there are a lot of art house flicks there, and this flick slams them together in a very cool way. Italians have a fixation on the duality between death and love, and this flick tries to rationalize the juxtaposition of the two never letting go of one another. It stars Rupert Everett as the head dude in charge of a cemetery in Northern Italy in a town called Buffalora. For whatever reason, when people die and are buried here, they don't stay dead, and after many long years working here, he's become used to them coming back. The story of his downward spiral is chronicled here in CEMETERY MAN!!!





The very first scene begins with Dellamorte leaving the shower to answer the phone to his only friend (outside of his seemingly mentally handicapped assistant Gnaghi) Franco. While on the phone, someone rings the doorbell. While still on the phone, Dellemorte glances at the man's dirty fingernails and notices a worm crawling on him. He immediately shoots the man in the head, and resumes his conversation. It seems that the stiffs that are buried here resurrect after 7 days, and as the movie goes on, they begin waking faster and faster. Dellamorte has tried to tell the mayor and the police but no one cares, so he just keeps on burying, killing and reburying with the help of Gnaghi (who turns out to be not as daft as Dellamorte believes).



One day, Dellamorte sees this hot young widow and falls in love immediately. He wonders if he'll ever see her again, and when she keeps returning to place flowers on her dead husband's grave, Dellamorte takes a chance, flirts with her, & finally convinces her to bang him. Then- at her request- they begin to bang on her dead husband's grave. All these weird blue fireflys or fairies begin to float around them til they shoo them away. I thought that was a really weird part. Not sure if that made more bad stuff happen or what you were supposed to gain from it, but right at that moment, her husband comes back, biting her on the neck. She comes back & he blows her away. Later she comes back again and he figures out she must not have been dead the first time, and now he's actually committed murder. This depresses him. Death visits him and tells him to stop killing his corpses, and he blows Death off, basically telling him he was too busy to mess with him.



So Dellemorte tries to tell everyone what's happening again at dinner, and Gnaghi falls for the mayors 12 year old daughter. The mayor just ignores him and his daughter goes on a motorcycle ride. A bus of boy scouts hits all the motorcyclers killing all of them. The mayors daughter is decapitated. Dellemorte has to take care of all of them and it only creates more work for him. But the mayor's new assistant is a "dead ringer" (haha) for "SHE" the one he fell in love with in the first place. ok, so, the assistant tells him she'll only marry him if he has no penis because she has a phobia of weiners going inside her, he goes to get his chopped off, but the doc just says lemme make you impotent for a while, then she falls in love with the mayor who raped her and now likes to be banged, but she leave him to marry the mayor because she thinks he is impotent now. Gnaghi digs up the mayors daughter and falls in love with her reanimated severed head. Some chick who loved the mayor's daughter's real boyfriend who died is freaking out and wants to be eaten by him, when Dellemorte tries to kill him again, he accidentally kills her.



Dellamorte goes on a rampage believing he can stop them from returning if he just kills them before they are dead. He kills the dudes who make fun of him for being impotent, then he meets another chick who looks like SHE, but sets her and her roommate on fire when he finds out she's a whore. Then instead of getting put away for the crimes like he seems to want, his friend Franco is blamed. He goes to ask him why he did it, killing a nun, a doc, a nurse and others. Finally he decides to split town, which he reminds himself he's never done. Gnaghi gets in trouble for trying to marry the mayor's daughter's head, but they just kill the mayor. Killing the reanimated mayor, and his daughter's head, Dellamorte tells Gnaghi to pack his shit, and they head through the tunnel. His worst fears realized, Dellamorte slams on the brakes and figures out the rest of the world doesn't exist. Looking over a cliff into nothingness, Gnaghi asks him to please take him home (the only words he spoke the whole movie). After checking this out, I realized the the same dude writes the comic Dylan Dog, the nightmare detective guy. Probably similar stuff. There was a movie made for that last year I think. I'll have to check it out. If you love comedy horror flicks then this is probably for you. word.

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