Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 29, 2024, 12:13:44 PM

Login with username, password and session length

CaB Film Club #3 - Cemetery Man

Started by greenman, April 28, 2019, 12:37:53 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

greenman

The preffered choice from a selection fo horrors Michele Soavi's Italian comedy horror Cementary man from 1994.



Trailer...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbQaRP0m2HE

Small Man Big Horse


Z

It's beyond crazy how much my attitude towards watching this changed when I realised it was in English (are some actors dubbed?)

Was actively dreading it, now I'm like "oh great, this thing looks 90s as fuck, should be fun!"

Small Man Big Horse

#3
Well that was a mental film. Absurd, pretentious, occasionally badly acted but also very funny in places and it's something I'm really quite fond of. Absolutely exhausted today due to a bout of insomnia but I'll try and put some thoughts together about it over the next couple of days.

Edit: Once again I'm a fucking liar, here's a review of it I wrote to put on my site at some point. Contains spoilers:

Directed by long-time Dario Argento assistant Michele Soavi and starring Rupert Everett this nineties comedy horror is one of the oddest films ever made, and I've seen over 981 odd movies. It's absurd, it's pretentious, it's ridiculous and sometimes silly, while some of the acting is truly awful and most of the characters sound dubbed even when they clearly aren't, but despite such issues it's a film I'm extremely fond of.

The plot's not actually that complicated, though nearly everything else in the film is, as cemetery keeper Francesco Dellamorte (Everett) keeps watch over the graveyard and has to keep on shooting the undead in the head as they have an annoying habit of returning to life seven days after their demise, and sometimes even more quickly than that. Assisted by the all but mute Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro) he also has a bizarre love for reading phone books and falls in love with three different women, even though he's only spent less than five minutes with them, all of whom look identical and are played by the same actress (Anna Falchi).

Francesco has a love for philosophising about everything he encounters, or cynically mocking events, he's quite the nihilist too apart from when he falls in love and has hot and sweaty make out sessions before they even exchange phone numbers. He pontificates on all manner of subjects but the nature of love and death are the main things, and the film is laden with symbolism throughout, be it his name (Dellamorte meaning "Of death", rather conveniently) while it turns out his mother's maiden name was Dellamore ("Of love") and he's obsessed by both. Not that the undead rising bothers him that much most of the time, and when his beloved dies of fright he's devastated for, ooh, a good sixty seconds before forgetting all about her for a large chunk of the film. One shot of the duo kissing mimics the painting "The Lovers" by Rene Magritte, and I'm sure there were many other references to famous art that I missed.

It's also deliberately funny at many points, when Gnaghi burns an old phone book Francesco freaks out and shouts "But that's the phone book, are you crazy, that is my favourite reading - just because we've got the new one doesn't mean we have to say we have to throw the old ones away, these books are classics" though why he finds them so fascinating is hard to explain. Much of the violence is extremely casual, with one fantastic sequence seeing Francesco killing off an undead horde while chatting to his friend Franco on the phone, and it's also a film which contains a flirty talking head who Gnaghi falls in love with, one member of the undead is buried with his motorcycle and returns to life melded to it, while a girl who loves one of the dead is truly put out when Francesco tries to help her, exclaiming "Mind your business, I shall be eaten by whoever I please".

On the down side it has quite the odd relationship with sex, Gnaghi falls in love with a fourteen year old girl (who ends up as the aforementioned talking head who conveniently has the ability to fly, though none of the other corpses do), one version of the woman Francesco loves is raped by the town mayor but is horribly happy about it, saying that though she hated the first time she loved the second, and after finding out the a woman he slept with was a prostitute Francesco burns her and her friends to death. For some unknown reason everyone thinks Francesco impotent so incapable of being a rapist / murderer, though he proves them wrong on the latter front, and the film's relationship with the casual slaughter of the living is plain weird.

Some of the acting is weak too, Everett's great and carries the movie, in the hands of a lesser actor it would be a disaster, and Francois Hadji-Lazaro is really decent too, but Anna Fulchi is unfortunately pretty wooden, it's not the worst performance I've ever seen in a horror movie but it's not far off and she was presumably cast due to her willingness to disrobe whenever required and let Everett cover her body in kisses / saliva. Some of the townsfolk are little more than caricatures and the bizarrely stupid cop who never suspects Francesco of doing wrong, even when he's wandering around a hospital with a gun where four people have just been shot dead, is played in a less than subtle manner.

Some of the Francesco's thoughts about the world are either plain mad, pretentious or on the nose and daft, and an appearance from Death itself doesn't exactly help it from being so ridiculous. Yet despite everything I've mentioned I can't help but like it, the story zigs and zags all over the place, when it's being deliberately funny it did make me laugh a lot, and even some of the dodgy acting is strangely endearing. The director over reaches and tries to say too much in too short a time, and sometimes does so quite badly, but at least it's something quite unique and as long as you can forgive it's shortcomings it's a film you'll probably secretly cherish.

zomgmouse

I really liked the first two thirds of it but it sort of lost me when it went (even more) off the rails. Coincidentally that's when it got a bit more distasteful like the scene SMBH mentions with the secretary admitting she'd been raped, or the main character burning down a house full of young women.

I suppose it's meant to mimic his insanity and normally I'm all for films that turn into displays of insanity but for whatever reason it became slightly too ungraspable.

Still, plenty of great moments and lines, and the opening scene in particular was an incredible setup. I really enjoyed most of it but towards the end it definitely slipped in my estimation.

Sin Agog

Quote from: zomgmouse on April 30, 2019, 08:09:40 AM
I really liked the first two thirds of it but it sort of lost me when it went (even more) off the rails. Coincidentally that's when it got a bit more distasteful like the scene SMBH mentions with the secretary admitting she'd been raped, or the main character burning down a house full of young women.

I suppose it's meant to mimic his insanity and normally I'm all for films that turn into displays of insanity but for whatever reason it became slightly too ungraspable.

Still, plenty of great moments and lines, and the opening scene in particular was an incredible setup. I really enjoyed most of it but towards the end it definitely slipped in my estimation.

I always imagined Dellamorte's actions in the last third being a result of getting bitten.  No, in this universe you don't turn when you're bitten, but he almost instantly has an encounter with death and starts to do his bidding, so maybe you become a wraith of sorts with one foot in both worlds?  The movie immediately changes tone the second the resurrected widow sinks her teeth into him.  It becomes more like the last third of Fear & Loathing- like a dark drug has thickened the blood in its veins.

I'd probably have been better qualified to talk about Cemetery Man fifteen, sixteen years ago.  I got so hooked on the movie that I binged all of Soavi's excellent early horror films (finding out that Cemetery Man was his last ever entry in the genre- from there on out it was strictly sober source material for him).  Its particular strain of weirdness works for me.  I find The Shaggs and The Room leave me feeling like a queasy voyeur, and last year's Beverly Luff Linn proved it's not easy to spirit up something great and odd without sucking all the air out of the room with self-consciousness, but this works.  It feels like the last gasp of a particular type of Italian horror movie, featuring as it does an international cast, a lot of dubbing and Foley work, and a certain kind of internal logic which only make sense in dreams and Italian horror pictures.  It's a shame that royal-botherer, Rupert Everett, never did anything else as compelling again.

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: Sin Agog on May 02, 2019, 09:29:33 PM
I always imagined Dellamorte's actions in the last third being a result of getting bitten.  No, in this universe you don't turn when you're bitten, but he almost instantly has an encounter with death and starts to do his bidding, so maybe you become a wraith of sorts with one foot in both worlds?  The movie immediately changes tone the second the resurrected widow sinks her teeth into him.  It becomes more like the last third of Fear & Loathing- like a dark drug has thickened the blood in its veins.

That's a good theory, I like that.

Sebastian Cobb


greenman

Certainly more interesting visually(at points anyway) so the Argentino connection definitely makes sense. Acting wise most of the cast seem to be aware that there expected to camp it up and to be frankly Fulchi IS there mostly to look pretty and get naked when needed.

Maybe I'v giving the film too much credit and I'm not sure it was entirely successful it in but it felt like it was some kind of commentary on the genre or maybe wider society? I mean the ending implies that the story takes place in some kind of isolated fantasy, it could be taken to be some form of afterlife for the characters I spose but I think seems more like an acknowledgement of its own artifice.

The dead rising and having to be brutally killed being such a mundane thing(maybe some Ghostbusters influence there?) maybe a comment on the benality of violence in the genre or society as a whole which ultimately ends up being inflicted in an equally casual fashion on the living as the protagonist is caught up in the influence of death himself(which goes right back to Fulchi falling for him in the crypt)

If your kind perhaps that excuses some of the dodgier sexual elements as satire? I spose the underage romance is deliberately kept childlike by only having her head involved but the rape comments seems pretty cack handed even for an Italian horror film otherwise.

DukeDeMondo

I hadn't seen this in a long, long time, but I found that I feel much the same way about it now, in 2019, as I did away back whenever. I still prefer the draughtier first acts - and they are draughty as fuck, every other shot has a curtain or a veil or someone's hair billowing into the frame from somewhere - to the final 30 minutes or so, which may be more ambitious in some ways but feel a bit less so in others, somehow. Those first forty-five, fifty minutes are absolutely stunning, though. Running over with imagination, untamed and demented and otherworldly, funny as fuck and unpredictable and replete with images that are utterly enchanting. The kiss in the ossuary with the heads covered is one of my favourite moments in anything. Clearly Funeral For A Friend liked it too, at a time.

Rupert - looking uncannily like the end result of some sort of shoving into other of Bruce Campbell and Tenpole Tudor - does well throughout, I'd say, he brings a fair few LOLs, but the biggest laughs come from the sheer balls of the thing. Blowing holes through the heads of dead schoolchildren. I know it's Italian, and Italian horror pictures are historically little bothered by that sort of gas, but it still takes the breath away. The version that was available in the UK prior to re-submission in 2012 was cut by a few minutes. I'm guessing it was the holes in the heads of the dead schoolchildren that were snipped. I would have seen that cut version back in the day but I can't remember it well enough to say for sure what was missing from it.

But.

"He's only eating me." "He's only eating me," she says.

At times I was put in mind of Evil Dead, in addition to Argento, and then at other times I was put in mind of Brazil, or Re-Animator, or City Of The Living Dead, or Amityville II, but for all that those films, one of which Soavi was directly involved with, seem to have influenced the imagery and the tone here or there to greater or lesser extent, it never feels like anything other than it's own wild eyed lunatic self. And yes, there are things in it that would make me feel decidedly uncomfortable about recommending it to anyone (although I did recommend it to someone earlier this week), but those things, however horrible, feel like crucial components. Essential to the billowing, bilious, fucked up old air that hangs all around about it.

As an aside, I used to live across the street from an Italian restaurant that Rupert frequented. I never saw him there, but my partner at the time often did, and I was told that Rupert would regularly show up in decorator's overalls with a rolled up length of carpet over his shoulder, so keen was he to appear other than himself. Of course this attire and these accessories did nothing but draw attention almost immediately, and he was soon identified, far sooner than he would have been if he'd just shown up in normals.

Maybe that was his game all along. Who knows?

Anyway. Cemetery Man. Dellamorte Dellamore. A rare sort of gift of a thing, really, I would say.

Sin Agog

Niiiice, Duke.  Psyched to have you on board and loved that write-up.  Used to pore through some of your long recommendation threads that came up on google long before I ever thought about signing up.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: Sin Agog on May 10, 2019, 07:42:27 PM
Niiiice, Duke.  Psyched to have you on board and loved that write-up.  Used to pore through some of your long recommendation threads that came up on google long before I ever thought about signing up.

Ah man, thank you very much, that's a lovely thing to say. I'm very happy to be on board.

Z

Watched this, have really nothing to say beyond "very much not my thing". Was novel enough for me to see a film of this style in the mid 90s at least.