Cemetery Man (1994)
★½ — Cemetery Man (1994)
There's a version of Cemetery Man that works. A brooding cemetery caretaker who routinely shoots the freshly reanimated dead back into their graves, philosophising all the while, his hapless assistant by his side, fog rolling across the headstones. That sounds, on paper, like a proper cult gem. Gothic, strange, a little bit sexy, a little bit funny. The kind of film you'd press into a mate's hands and say "trust me." Unfortunately, what's actually on screen is something far less enjoyable: a sprawling, incoherent mess that mistakes confusion for depth and tedium for atmosphere.
Rupert Everett plays the caretaker, and I'll give him this: he has the cheekbones for brooding. But brooding is about all he does. There's detachment, and then there's sleepwalking, and Everett spends most of the running time on the wrong side of that line. He's not mysterious. He's just absent. The supporting cast don't help matters much. Some of them are wooden, some are wildly over-the-top, and none of them feel like they're in quite the same film as each other, which is appropriate, really, because Cemetery Man doesn't feel like it knows what film it is either.
The zombie rules, such as they are, collapse on inspection. The dead rise seven days after burial, apparently. Except when they don't. Except when they do so for completely different reasons. There's a zombie on a motorbike at one point, which could be gloriously daft in the right hands, but here it just floats past without a payoff. The film keeps gesturing at dark satire, at something to say about death, desire, meaninglessness. But gesture is all it manages. The philosophical mumbling that pads out scene after scene never coalesces into an actual idea. It's the cinematic equivalent of someone saying "you know what I mean?" over and over without ever quite saying the thing.
Visually, I'll throw it a bone. There are moments, fog-thick graveyards, the odd surreal image, where you can see what the filmmakers were reaching for. It's got Italian flair in flashes, the kind of lurid, heightened visual style that made me think of Nightmare City, another Italian genre film that throws logic out the window. But where that film has a kind of deranged momentum to it, Cemetery Man just… drags. At nearly two hours, scenes go on well past the point where their ideas (such as they are) have expired. The erotic fantasy elements feel disconnected from everything else, not provocative, not satirical, just odd in a way that doesn't earn its oddness.
The dialogue is frequently laughable. Not in a winking, self-aware way that invites you to enjoy it, but in a "did they really just say that?" way that jolts you clean out of the film's already tenuous spell. There's a difference between absurdist comedy and writing that just didn't come together, and this is firmly the latter.
Here's the thing about "so bad it's good." It requires a kind of accidental energy, a film that's swinging for something and missing in spectacular, entertaining fashion. Cemetery Man doesn't really swing. It ambles. The laughs you get are laughs of disbelief, not delight. It's not campy fun, it's not subversive horror, it's not erotic gothic romance. It's all three of those things, badly, simultaneously, and the combination doesn't add up to anything greater than the sum of its parts. It adds up to considerably less.
Ambitious in concept and genuinely disastrous in execution, this is the kind of film that makes you wonder what the pitch meeting looked like and how anyone heard "yes" at the end of it. If you love Italian genre cinema and have a high tolerance for narrative incoherence, maybe there's something here for you. For everyone else, it's a frustrating near-miss that never misses by enough to become interesting. One and a half stars.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 1994 | Watched: 2026-05-04
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023) · The Firemen's Ball (1967)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Anastasia (1997)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
