Films That Witness Madness

review

CEMETERY MAN

By now, the idea of a comedic zombie film is old news. Recent films like FIDO, SHAUN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBIELAND have all but drained the idea dry. Humor lends itself rather easily to the zombie film. They are largely nonsensical - well, Italian zombie films anyway - and the villains of the films, those shambling, rotting zombies, allow for the maximum amount of over-the-top human-on-human carnage with the minimum amount of sympathy for those on the losing end of the battle. Michele Soavi's 1993 film CEMETERY MAN isn't your average zombie comedy. While the film is in fact incredibly funny, it is also surprisingly touching and rather deep. There are not a lot of zombie films out there that can manage to scare you, entertain you, make you laugh, make you feel a bit sad and make you ponder the meaning of life all at the same time but this film does all of it and all under the guise of a clever horror / comedy about a cemetery caretaker and his idiot sidekick blasting away the undead.

Francesco Dellamorte is the caretaker in charge of the Buffalora Cemetery, an aging semi-Gothic nightmare with a rather unusual problem. It seems the dead are not staying dead. After about a week in the ground, the corpses crawl out of their graves, so Francesco and his assistant - the fat, Curly Howard-esque, man child Gnaghi - have to kill them a second time. Lonely, depressed and surrounded everywhere by death, Francesco spends his free time reading old phone books and trying to piece together a human skull. When he meets a beautiful, young widow, he falls in love with her - the woman, only credited as She is played by the beautiful Anna Falchi. During a bout of lovemaking on her dead husband's grave, they are attacked and she is wounded. When she revives, Francesco shoots her head, thinking her to be a zombie. Spiraling even further into depression, Francesco hallucinates - possibly hallucinates, rather - that he is visited by Death, is repeatedly confronted by women who look like his now lost love and is entertaining the idea that his life might be simpler if he started killing the living.

To say anymore would ruin the film for those of you who haven't seen it as the remaining half of the film is full of weirdly wonderful events - a romance between Gnaghi and a severed head, a zombie erupting out of the ground on a motorcycle, a chemical castration, several bloody massacres and an ending which plays out like an Existential redux of the ending to Fulci's THE BEYOND. At times, it is extremely difficult to get a handle on where the film is going or what exactly Soavi and screenwriter Gianni Romoli are trying to say through it. For me, CEMETERY MAN is a film largely about love. Francesco is very much the emasculated male. He lives a solitary life - as he himself notes, living with Gnaghi is almost like living alone - full of frustration. His constant encounters with women who look like She only forces him deeper into depression. Not because of his guilt but because he simply cannot possess her. Each incarnation of their relationship ends badly. Contrasting this is Gnaghi's relationship with the severed head of the Mayor's daughter. Their relationship is simple and sweet, almost childlike in it's innocence, but Francesco's relationships with the various incarnations of She are complicated and devastating because they involve sex and because Francesco, unlike Gnaghi, understands the need for love all too well. What else can a man cling to when his world is steeped in death?

That's not to say that CEMETERY MAN is all philosophical pondering and gooey romantic babble. It's also a full-blooded horror film and Soavi packs on the grue with reckless abandon. Aside from a few cornball effects like the floating, blue orbs that are swung around on obvious, easily spotted wires and a few poorly made up dummies, CEMETERY MAN is full of spot-on special effects. While the zombie kills are well below the gooey standards set by George Romero, the real life violence meted out by Francesco is disturbingly graphic - the massacre in the hospital never fails to startle - and the film deserves it's reputation as a Gorehound classic. As if to keep the film from tumbling down an uncomfortable rabbit hole, Soavi mixes these scenes of violence with scenes of humor - Francesco gunning down a group of freshly raised kids would have easily been most extreme scene in the film but Soavi stages it all with Gnaghi messily eating a bowl of ice cream while watching television, pushing the corpse of a dead zombie child off his lap with absent-minded annoyance. This mixture of humor and violence, sex and Surrealism, makes CEMETERY MAN a film that makes boredom impossible. There is simply so much going on and the film operates on every conceivable level that anyone with the balls to give it a go will walk out feeling satisfied.

Essential viewing.

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