Cemetery Man (1994)
★½ — Cemetery Man (1994)
Cemetery Man, released in Italy as Dellamorte Dellamore, arrived in 1994 as a co-production between Italian, French and German studios, Audifilm, Urania Film and KG Productions among them, at a moment when European genre cinema was in a curious place. The Italian horror tradition that had produced so many wild and wilfully strange films across the preceding decades was winding down commercially, yet directors working in that space were still reaching for something more ambitious than straight-up schlock. The film is adapted from the 1991 novel of the same name by Tiziano Sclavi, who is perhaps better known as the creator of the long-running Italian comic series Dylan Dog, a horror detective whose DNA is all over this story. Francesco Dellamorte, a cemetery caretaker whose dead have a habit of refusing to stay buried, is essentially a cousin of that character, and the source material carries that same blend of melancholy, black humour and romantic fatalism that made the comics popular. Whether a film could successfully bottle that particular mixture was always going to be the central question. For a sense of how Italian genre cinema from this era could go, it is worth glancing back at Nightmare City, another Italian horror film reviewed here, which similarly plays fast and loose with its own internal logic.
The director is Michele Soavi, who had worked as an assistant to Dario Argento and established himself through a handful of horror features in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cemetery Man represented his largest and most formally ambitious project to that point, a 103-minute film with international backing and a lead actor recognisable well beyond Italian cinema. The production carries a polished but unremarkable visual grammar for much of its runtime, though Soavi clearly has an eye for the occasional arresting image. The mix of nationalities behind the camera, Italian roots but French and German co-financing, gives the film a slightly stateless quality that perhaps suits its surreal subject matter, though it also creates a certain unevenness in tone and execution.
At the centre of it all is Rupert Everett, the British actor who by 1994 had appeared in a range of film and theatre work but had not yet reached the wider mainstream recognition that would come later in the decade. His casting as the brooding, philosophically inclined Dellamorte is an interesting one on paper: the character demands someone who can carry long stretches of introspective screen time while remaining watchable. Alongside him, French actor François Hadji-Lazaro plays Gnaghi, Dellamorte's largely non-verbal assistant, a role that asks for physical comedy and a kind of gentle pathos. Anna Falchi, an Italian-Finnish model and actress, plays the unnamed woman who becomes the object of Dellamorte's obsession, a role that is more symbolic than psychological in its demands. The supporting cast is rounded out by Mickey Knox and Fabiana Formica. For another flavour of Italian cinema, though of a very different register, the site also has reviews of Call Me by Your Name and No Dogs or Italians Allowed, both of which share only the national connection with this rather stranger offering.
Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore, 1994) tries to straddle the line between gothic horror, absurdist comedy, and erotic fantasy, but ends up collapsing under the weight of its own incoherence. Starring Rupert Everett as a brooding cemetery caretaker who battles zombies that inexplicably rise from the graves (exactly seven days after burial but also apparently randomly), the film offers a premise ripe for dark satire. Unfortunately, it squanders that potential with muddled storytelling, baffling character choices, and a tone that lurches wildly between grim melancholy and campy farce without ever finding balance. The acting is uniformly poor: Everett phones in his performance with sleepy detachment, while supporting players deliver lines with either wooden stiffness or over-the-top hamminess. The zombies themselves (randomly reanimated corpses with no consistent rules or logic, hello zombie motorbike?) feel like an afterthought, more plot device than threat. And the dialogue is often laughable, not in a clever, self-aware way, but in the “did they really say that?” sense that pulls you right out of the film. Visually, there are fleeting moments of style (a fog-drenched graveyard here, a surreal dream sequence there) but they’re drowned out by sluggish pacing and scenes that drag on far longer than their ideas warrant. At nearly two hours, it feels interminable, especially when nothing much is happening beyond philosophical mumbling or bizarre sexual encounters that add little to theme or plot. Cemetery Man isn’t so much “so bad it’s good” as it is “so confused it’s tedious.” Any laughs come from disbelief, not design. It’s a hot mess (ambitious in concept, disastrous in execution) and one of those films that makes you wonder how it ever got made. Watch it only if you enjoy cinematic train wrecks with Italian flair.
And honestly, that train-wreck quality is part of why I kept watching, even as my patience wore thin. There is something almost fascinating about a film so convinced of its own profundity that it mistakes confusion for depth and meandering for mood. I have sat through plenty of horror films that failed on their own terms, including some reviewed here that at least had the decency to be straightforwardly bad, but Cemetery Man is a rarer creature: a film that had genuine ingredients to work with and still managed to fumble nearly all of them. For fans of Italian genre cinema, it is probably worth one watch out of curiosity, if only to understand what people mean when they describe something as a cult film less for its quality than for its sheer audacity. But I would not be in any hurry to revisit it. Some graveyards are best left undisturbed.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 1994 | Watched: 2026-05-04
Trailer
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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)
