Slashing The Seats

Sometimes you can be forgiven for suspecting the movie you’re about to sit through is going to be woeful claptrap. Cemetery Man seems, from the cover, to satisfy every criteria for this kind of low expectation. It stars Rupert Everett, for Christ’s sake. But then, through sheer insanity and stupidity, it three-sixties into one of the most wonderfully over-the-top showcases for madness you’re ever going to see. When a film goes so far out of its way to make you look at the screen aghast, it has to have something going for it. And it’s this kind of care-free idiocy that marks Cemetery Man as a cut above other overlooked zombie flicks. It simply doesn’t seem to care what you think of it. It’s a bloody-minded lunatic of a film.

For starters, this Italian production mentions Berlusconi in a production capacity as the credits roll. And after they’ve rolled, you realise the sound mix is so creakily dubbed that you’re going to be spending the next hour or so watching mouths move just out of synch with what you’re hearing. Add to this Everett’s overpowering voiceover, his usual plummy tones overridden by a strange attempt at a mockney-ish drawl, and you’re in very dodgy territory indeed. But then the premise is explained and, with Everett as resident zombie-killer at a cemetery where the dead suddenly walk again, seven days after burial, the first killing brings the fun to the fore fantastically quickly.

Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte and his comic foil is his chubby gravedigging co-worker, Gnaghi – an irritatingly stupid, semi-mute tit. Gnaghi is responsible for a great deal of the trouble Francesco finds himself in, though most of his woes stem from the libido he’s rumoured not have. He’s an impotent outcast as far as the townsfolk are concerned, and the scenes whenever Francesco leaves the cemetery for town are unintentionally hilarious, with extras who are clearly Italian – with scooters, greased ponytails etc… – speaking in obviously dubbed Dick Van Dyke accents. The dialogue is terrible whenever there are more than two people onscreen, and even then it’s shaky. But your forgive it because you know another glorious set piece is right around the corner. The frantic tone is set from the off.

By the final third, things go from fast to frenetic and it begins to feel like the wilful insanity of Evil Dead II has been reborn in an Italian movie version of The Bold & The Beautiful. With hilarious action juxtaposed with brilliantly bad dialogue and one-liners, it can’t fail to be the an almost completely improbable winner. Who’d have thought it?

Tweet This!