Cemetery Man (1994)
Directed by Michele Soavi
Francesco Dellamorte is the groundskeeper at a cemetery where the dead just won’t stay dead—and it’s up to him to deal with those who come back to life with a hunger for human flesh. But Dellamorte’s job soon becomes much more complicated when he falls for an enigmatic young woman whose husband has recently died.
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8 films that influenced Cemetery Man
What critics say influenced Cemetery Man
In effect, CEMETERY MAN is part of the tradition of Italian horror films that prize imagery over substance, rather like Argento’s Suspiria and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond.
Director Michele Soavi, a disciple of Dario Argento (Suspiria), strikes a unique tone with all this.
Based on the wildly popular Italian comic book Dellamorte, Dellamore from Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog series, Cemetery Man is the bastard progeny of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and any number of Fellini films.
A macabre blend of elements that separately would be at home in "Rain Man," "Love Story," "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dracula," "Cemetery Man" details the graveyard duo's bloody and occasionally sexual interactions with the recently deceased in a small Italian town, where those recently deceased due to a strange post-mortem epidemic become the newly revived and can only be dispatched back to their eternal rest by blowing, cleaving or otherwise gerunding their heads open.
Viewers who loved Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985) the other week at the Thursday Horror Picture Show will definitely find much to like here.
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Cemetery Man recalls Bob Balaban's 1993 feature, My Boyfriend's Back, but with a much nastier edge.
But the final hour is a slow and talky, even pretentious, exposition on love and death that owes more than a little to Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" in style and which will bore most audiences.
If Meet the Feebles wasn't your cup of tea, Night of the Living Dead grossed you out, and you didn't see the humor in The Evil Dead , then Cemetery Man is definitely not for you.
Like Evil Dead II or Re-Animator, the film leans into modern comedy, but it also passes through moments of genuine longing and even existential crisis.