CEMETERY MAN (Dellamorte Dellamore)

I have become increasingly wary of so-called "cult films". These are movies that are often overlooked by mainstream audiences, but have an extremely rabid fan-base of viewers nonetheless. Usually they are too quirky for mainstream tastes, and would be the type of flicks you'd see as a midnight movie in a college town. And lately, I have found, some cult movies can probably only can be fully enjoyed with a crowd that gets the joke, especially when you don't. Hmmm....

Cemetery Man was recommended to me by some movie-literate techie folks who thought I would like it when I told them one of my favorite films was Heavenly Creatures. These folks highly praised it for being a clever comic/horror masterpiece that not many people had heard of. I assume they felt if I liked Creatures director Peter Jackson's very dark humor, that I'd also get a kick out of CM. Though CM tries for the morbid horror in the spirit of the Evil Dead movies, it falls short of being that clever.

Rupert Everett plays a cemetery caretaker named Francesco Dellamorte. He and his lumpy, mute sidekick Gnaghi spend most of their evenings shooting come-to-life corpses in the head, or splitting their skulls in half with a shovel, having to "kill" them again when they tend to rise from the grave after seven days. However, for some reason the corpses are coming back at a much quicker rate, after only a few days.

Rupert falls for a mysterious beautiful young widow. After the two of them have sex on her husband's grave, her husband "wakes up", pissed off, and takes a bite out of her, sending her to the grave (so to speak). Rupert glumly accepts his task of waiting to whack her in the head as soon as she rises, and laments his loss with such lines as, "I’d give my life to be dead."

Now, there was a lot of promise in the film, really. It has great cinematography for a low-budget flick, and some fun pseudo-philosophy about death. Distraught and uncaring Rupert starts to run into doppelganger's of his girl, and goes on a killing rampage or two (they all end up coming back anyways). The carnage scenes are gory and comically fun. And I give a whole slice of pie just for the numerous gratuitous Rupert-taking-a-shower scenes (who wouldn't?).

But as far as a rental flick, Cemetery Man falls flat. I assume when you watch this with a raucous crowd of fans, it might be more fun. But at living-room level, with a friend or two on the couch trying to stay awake, the movie-plods along and is a bit boring, really. Wake me up when the credits are over.