Can't believe there's no review thread for this one. Often tagged 'the last great Italian horror film', a claim I don't feel qualified to take a stance on as most of the Italo-horrors I've seen came out in the sixties and seventies, it's really an amazing and yet somewhat indescribable piece of work.
I really and truly love my straight-up, sometimes hokey classic gothic horror business, and one thing that's great about Cemetery Man is that it has all that - the foggy moonlit graveyard, grey-faced/earth-encrusted/blue-nailed members of the living dead, ominous musical cues and other stock elements. When I first saw this movie a year or so ago I had only a vague idea of what I would be seeing and I expected something along the lines of a Hammer horror setting, giallo plot and decent amount of chills and gore, solid but not especially memorable. The film melds these elements, however, with out-of-the-blue existential drama, gallows humour, incredibly bizarre, surreal visuals, a deep sense of romance and an impenetrable yet somehow meaningful twisting mindfuck of a plot which I as yet haven't fully deciphered (in fact I am not persuaded that anyone so far has, perhaps even Soavi included) but which leaves an enticing amount of space for potential hypotheses. Somehow, instead of the fragmented nature of the film causing it to be unsatisfactory on any one level, for me at least it works fully on all levels (even the levels I'm not so sure I understand).
Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte is not only picture-perfect in the rich setting*, but gives a hilariously casual, deadpan performance as a morose misanthrope whose hobbies are limited to attempting to solve a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and reading the phonebook, and whose nights are occupied by zombie-hunting (which he seems to take very much in his stride). His assistant Gnaghi, played by François Hadji-Lazaro, and the mysterious apple of Francesco's eye, played by the uncommonly gorgeous Anna Falchi, both fill their roles very well. The film has a melodramatic, wonderfully European sense of tragi-comedy and an emotional resonance even as it takes hard left turn after left turn. It's also chock full as I mentioned of visually stunning, dream-like set-pieces (one of my favourites being the blue flame will-o'-the-wisps following Francesco as he goes after the widow one night, another being when Death appears to Francesco, building himself out of burning pieces of paper). The soundtrack is eerie, reminds me of a synthesized spaghetti-western score and augments rather than detracts from the film. Unrelated to anything, when Gnaghi keeps Valentina's head in the tv set, I'm reminded of the Cramps' 'Tv Set'. There are some rather histrionic, even eyepopping events in the film, but they're only another important addition to this weird cinematic ghoulash (see what I did there).
Personally, along with several Bava films and Suspiria, it's one of my favourite Italian horror/fantasy films, and is in my top five films from the nineties. I'm sure most or a lot of you have seen this, but if you haven't I recommend you give it a try, unless you demand some semblance of logic or realism in your films (neither of which I consider to be horror's strong points).
(*Dellamorte Dellamore is apparently loosely based on both Tiziano Sclavi's novel of the same name and his comics Dylan Dog (one chapter of which features the two lead characters from the novel/film), in which the eponymous character's face was modeled after Everett's.)
