Cemetery Man (1994, Michele Soavi) (Patreon)

30/100

Look, I don't enjoy being one of those anti-imaginative souls who demands basic internal logic even from deliberately cheesy genre exercises. I just am one of them. Someone who's simply incapable of ignoring, for example, that Cemetery Man introduces a very specific premise—"All I know," Dellamorte tells us in voiceover narration, "is that some people, on the seventh night after their death*, come back to life"—and then immediately violates that premise in multiple ways, as corpses arise within minutes of dying, or alternatively after having been dead for way longer than a week. And that's just the beginning of this movie's bludgeoning incoherence. Why are most of the undead Romero-style mute shuffling ghouls, while others, like Valentina, can speak quite normally? Was a zombie apocalypse necessary, or in any way useful, as the backdrop for the whole Gift of the Magi bit in which Dellamorte makes himself impotent (and actually seeks to have himself castrated) so that he might win the love of his phallophobic object of desire? Then the film takes an ostensibly darker turn, with Dellamorte losing sight of the distinction between reanimated corpses and living humans, but somehow decides that's what actually of interest is Dellamorte's comic frustration that someone else  received credit for his murders. There was never a moment when I had even the faintest grasp of what Cemetery Man wants to be or do or accomplish. It plays like ideas for half a dozen distinct narratives haphazardly strung together (wish it had stuck with the crippling guilt of a man who accidentally kills his beloved after mistakenly believing her already dead, but that quickly gets forgotten, with Anna Falchi just reassigned to another character, and then another still, in Half-Assed Vertigo Homage #3,537), culminating in an "ambiguous" ending that's basically the St. Elsewhere series finale redux**. 

In theory, I can understand that genrehounds don't care about any of those screenwriting lapses, so long as the movie delivers plenty of salacious and/or gory fun. Here, though, the lapses appear to be the draw, as far as I can tell. Fans don't cherish specific moments so much as they admire exactly what bugged me, viz. the way that Cemetery Man keeps wildly shifting into some new warped direction that in no way follows from any previous warped direction. If you took my favorite individual sequences from (let's say) Night of the Living Dead and Deathdream and It Follows and The Lair of the White Worm and Halloween and Proxy and somehow managed to fashion a single barely intelligible film that lurches from one kickass setpiece to another, I don't imagine that I'd find the result terribly satisfying (see: the recent Mission: Impossibles)...and this is much more like fashioning a narrative from my least favorite individual sequences in those movies. Not in sync with Italian horror's notion of what's sexy about women (which is to say that I'm no longer a 13-year-old boy and didn't retain a 13-year-old boy's sensibility in that regard); don't find Gnaghi a very compelling Igor (if I want to see someone hurl all over a woman out of anxiety, I'll seek out un film de Tom Shadyac); am kind of amazed by how thoroughly this material defeats Rupert Everett's abilities as an actor (which he'd already been demonstrating for a decade and a half by that point, yet this seems like it must have been his very first role). Only thing that leapt out at me (almost literally) as memorably outré was a very minor character named Claudio being buried with his motorcycle and then emerging from the grave (too soon! on the seventh night, you said!) astride said motorcycle, as his obsessed still-living girlfriend desperately runs after him. That was damn funny. Otherwise, very little superficially engaged me, I'm afraid, and so all of the incoherence stood out in bas-relief. At least now I know that my not seeing it in '96 didn't cost it any Skandies points. 

* While checking the dialogue, I discovered that English subtitles for the Italian dub alter virtually every line in the movie, sometimes pretty significantly. That one becomes "within seven days of their death"—words that permit more accuracy than "on the seventh night," but still don't explain the husband's resuscitation, which seems motivated not by any paranormal rules but by Dellamorte and the widow fucking right next to his grave. Others might find that discrepancy funny rather than annoying, I suppose; might have laughed it off myself if not for all the fudging in the opposite direction. Really it just looks if nobody gave a shit whether anything in the film makes sense. 

** Disclaimer: I haven't seen St. Elsewhere's series finale. But I've known about it since not long after it aired. Currently midway through season three and it turns out that show was nuts in all kinds of ways, e.g. turning one of its main characters into a serial rapist (an arc that takes up at least 15 episodes over two seasons) and then having another main character—arguably the show's most easygoing and likeable—murder him after he's acquitted.