(Michele Soavi, Italy, 1987, 103 minutes)
Cemetery Man, Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi's fourth feature film, has it all.
To be sure, it's a horror film, zombie division. There are zombies, "returners" in the film's parlance, lurching all over this thing, but it's also a comedy and a love story--two love stories, no less. Other zom-coms, like 2013's Warm Bodies and 2014's Life After Beth, have combined the same genres, but Soavi got there decades before, and Cemetery Man, Delamorte Dellamore in its native country, is a model of the horror/comedy/romance form.
But wait! There's more, because it's also a star vehicle. No disrespect to the film's continental cast, who offer excellent value, but the film, in the best of ways, could be considered The Rupert Everett Show. Forget, or put aside, all of those period pieces, like Mike Newell's 1985 Dance With a Stranger, Everett has to carry this entire film on his back, and he makes it look easy.
Cemetery Man begins with Everett's Francesco Delamorte in his home at night. He's shirtless, cigarette dangling from the side of his downturned mouth, and looking for all the world like a goddamn movie star. He hears a sound at the door, opens it, comes face to face with an ashen-faced zombie with a fly buzzing around his ear, and shoots him in the noggin. The insouciant way he goes about the task indicates that this happens all the time. It's as funny as it is unexpected–an opening sequence for the ages.
And it does, indeed, happen all the time.
Ever since an epidemic ravaged Francesco's mountain village, many newly dead humans come back to life after seven days. Someone has to keep the zombie population under control, and he ended up with the gig. Instead of gratitude, however, the townspeople treat him like a pariah. The way they see it, he's no different than a garbage collector. Fortunately, he doesn't really care. Francisco is perfectly content to fill a role to which he appears to be well suited.
Nor is he alone, since he he has a trusty assistant, Gnaghi (actor-musician François Hadji-Lazaro of The City of Lost Children and French band Les Garçons Bouchers), who lives in the basement, digs the graves, gobbles food like an overgrown toddler, and spends his free time parked in front of the boob tube. Throughout the film, he makes non-verbal noises, but refrains from any recognizable words, with the possible exception of "gna."
Not insignificantly, Gnaghi serves as Francesco's negative image, a squat, shaven-headed cross between Moe of the Three Stooges and Buster Bloodvessel of British ska-punk outfit Bad Manners. He may not look like anyone's idea of a romantic hero, but just like his boss, Gnaghi will fall in love with a lovely young local, who will return his ardor in ways you can't possibly imagine--unless you've read the novel. Soavi pulls out all the stops to depict their hilariously grotesque and strangely touching romance.
Writer Gianni Romoli, meanwhile, adapted the screenplay from Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Delamorte Dellamore.
Though the film has taken hits over the years for the switch to Cemetery Man for English-speaking territories, it's an apt title that doubled as a savvy commercial move.
Further, by 1994, Everett had starred in an Oscar-winning short, 1982's A Shocking Accident, and scored a BAFTA nomination for 1984's Another Country, in which he played a role he had originated on stage in 1981. Though Soavi had a track record in Italy for his work in the horror genre, both on his own and with Dario Argento, Everett was seen as an international star who would make the film a hit, except it wasn't. And nor was it the fault of either gentleman, though I do have a few theories…
First of all, one of the film's biggest strengths, the way it mixes and mingles genres, may have confused critics, audiences, and exhibitors.
Second, the high-born Everett was a name, but he was best known for literary adaptations drawn from the works of Ian McEwan, Alan Bennett, and numerous others. There's nothing wrong with that–on the contrary–but it may have created a disconnect, with horror fans staying away, because he seemed too refined for the genre, and with Everett fans staying away because the material seemed beneath him. It's neither of those things, and the actor proved he could get his well-manicured hands as dirty as necessary, but I can understand the confusion his casting may have caused.
Then there's the more delicate matter of his sexual orientation.
It may not have been a factor, but I couldn't say for sure. Though Everett had played a gay character in both versions of Another Country, he didn't come out, in real life, until 1989. Afterward, he says, the job offers went away.
If anything, Soavi may have gotten a better deal for his services in 1994 than he would have in 1986 when Sclavi modeled the paranormal investigator at the center of his comic series Dylan Dog on Everett's handsomely-tousled appearance in Another Country.
Further, Everett may have been drawn to the project more because he needed the money than because he was passionate about the material, though knowing he had inspired a previous Sclavi character may have proved irresistibly appealing.
Not surprisingly, they've been conflated, but Dylan Dog and Francesco Dellamorte are different characters, though they do share similar, baddie-fighting characteristics. Amazingly, the series has continued for nearly 40 years, though Sclavi has been increasingly less involved with the writing.
In Cemetery Man, Everett plays things unambiguously straight–so straight that it becomes a liability.
Francesco's commitment to the bit will be put to the test toward the end, in ways both physical and spiritual. If anything, the discontents of hyper-heterosexuality is kind of the point of the film.
Francesco can slay zombies with the best of them, but he's so emotionally stunted that he can't form anything other than a purely sexual relationship with a woman. Some moviegoers may not have been ready to see this particular actor play that particular part, and yet Everett's ability to project both movie star charisma and an underdeveloped, adolescent sensibility is precisely what makes his performance sing.
Francesco is so unworldly and poorly educated, in fact, that he has only "read" two books, one he never finished and the phone book in which he crosses out the name of each corpse that ends up in the graveyard.
Everything changes--and not necessarily for the better--when he spots Anna Falchi's very young, very sexy widow in a funeral procession at his place of business, mourning the loss of her much older, very dead husband.
In Romoli's screenplay, she's simply named She.
Normally, it would irritate me that the men have proper names while the primary female character doesn't, except she represents Francesco's ideal, and he doesn't really see her as a person. Furthermore, Falchi will end up playing two more women in quick succession. Soavi never establishes whether they all really look alike, or whether Francesco simply imagines that they do, because his obsession with this unattainable creature has so thoroughly clouded his vision.
Since Cemetery Man is filled with surprises, I would rather avoid too many plot specifics, other than to say that Soavi, in his excellent commentary track, demurs that it's pretty episodic. He's not completely wrong, but that's hardly a liability, since it plays like a series of intricately-rendered comic book panels come to life--not least when a zombified motorcyclist bursts through the soil to ride again, an absolutely stunning in-camera effect that would not have made the same impact if created digitally. I went into the film cold, and I love the way it consistently keeps predictability at bay.
And that includes Falchi. There's no doubt that the model-turned-actress was hired for her looks, but she holds her own with Everett, despite the fact that it was her first leading role. It's quite a remarkable achievement.
Prior to Cemetery Man, Falchi was best known for a perfume ad shot by Federico Fellini.
Not a bad calling card for a 22-year-old aspiring actress, but no guarantee that she could credibly play three characters, one of whom will turn into a moldering zombie, and that isn't exactly a spoiler, since it happens surprisingly early on in the proceedings.
In the interview included with the new release, Falchi says the makeup sessions took as long as seven to eight hours. The release also comes with a making-of documentary, which includes footage of the painstaking process.
Though the film is filled with plenty of fun zombie jump scares, few things gave me more of a start than Falchi's first appearance on screen wearing sheer, designer-style widow's weeds, because she didn't seem quite real.
Just as the two teenage boys in John Hughes' 1985 horror-comedy Weird Science managed to miraculously create the seemingly perfect woman in the form of Kelly LeBrock–in a decidedly '80s twist on Frankenstein–Falchi's widow looks exactly like the kind of living centerfold a teenage boy or sex-obsessed comic book illustrator would dream up, and that isn't a knock.
Much as Australian transplant Margot Robbie had to conform to an all-American image of female perfection to play the living doll in Barbie, the Finnish-Italian actress wouldn't have passed muster if she looked too ordinary. With her full lips, almond eyes, ample bosom, and wasp waist, she's like something engineered in a lab, i.e. what most every member of the Kardashian clan wishes they looked like, except it's all apparently real. In the new interview, Falchi admits that she had extensions to make her long, honey-blonde hair look extra-luxurious, but that doesn't count as fakery in my book, just a touch of movie magic.
Aging comes for anyone who lives long enough, but many va-va-voom female performers don't wear it well. Falchi, who has aged more gracefully than your average blonde bombshell, is a major exception to the rule.
Everett, on the other hand, showed up for his on-camera interview wearing a very unflattering, extra-tall, red knit cap. I have no idea why, especially since it doesn't even look comfortable–it looks itchy. A fully-grown adult has the right to wear whatever he wants, of course, but it's a bizarre choice.
He also speaks about the film in flattering terms, though Soavi admits that they locked horns. By 1994, Everett had made films in both Italy and Spain, so I don't know if language or cultural differences left him feeling isolated, if the role of an antihero who makes a heel turn was getting to him, or if he expected more coddling on the set, but he appears to have had a fairly miserable time. Then, when the film proved something other than a hit, he claimed that Soavi was the worst director he had ever worked with. Though he doesn't mention it in his interview, Soavi definitely mentions it in his.
It wouldn't take long, however, for Cemetery Man to become a deserving cult classic. If Everett has warmed to it over the years, it may simply be because time has healed his wounds, or because it's no longer the redheaded stepchild of his CV. If anything, it's one of the glittering jewels in his crown. Unlike Soavi, who appears to have stopped working as a feature-film director in 2018, or Falchi, who appears to have stopped working as a leading lady in 2013, Everett is still plugging away.
Leading roles may be a thing of the past, but the 65-year-old continues to show up in studio productions, like Ridley Scott's 2023 Napoleon, in which he plays the Duke of Wellington, or Starz's The Serpent Queen, on which he plays Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Everett has also kept busy as a memoirist and novelist, and Simon and Schuster will release his next book, a collection of short stories called The American No, on October 3, 2024.
After Cemetery Man, Everett would avoid horror, notwithstanding a role as a demon in 2019's Muse and a guru in 2022's She Will. It wasn't really his thing, though he's perfect as Francesco Dellamorte. On the other hand, if the film had been a hit, we might have gotten a series of increasingly less heartfelt, less handcrafted sequels--better one great film that stands alone.
Cemetery Man, fully restored from the Cinecittà negative, is available on Blu-ray and 4K HD from Severin Films. Images from StudioCanal and IGN (Rupert Everett), Talk Film Society (Everett and François Hadji-Lazaro), IntoMore.com (Everett and Cary Elwes in Another Country), Hey Kids Comics! (Dylan Dog No. 1 cover by Claudio Villa), the IMDb (Everett admiring Anna Falchi), American Cinematheque (Falchi after zombification), Pinterest (Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science), and X (actor-director Michel Soavi on the set of 1991's The Sect with actor-director Dario Argento).
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