The first half of this film is just so good that it had me smiling, laughing and virtually applauding, even sat on my settee. It looks fantastic, the cemetery is as you dream they might be, the dialogue is far better than would expect in this genre and it is very funny with a fantastic performance from Rupert Everett in surely his greatest. Oh and it also makes you jump, has crazy gore, lots of kills and is very, very sexy. So, nothing really goes wrong and the film remains very good but once the emphasis is less upon the confines of the cemetery and we go outside to become involved with the Major and the question of his re-election and the local yobs, it is just not quite as delirious. In fairness the delirium of the first 45 or so minutes probably couldn't be kept up and maybe one would wear of it anyway so I shouldn't be too hard. Great film!

'Dellamorte Dellamore' - also known as 'Cemetery Man' - this offbeat horror-comedy blend is set in a town in which the recently deceased regularly come back to life. Rupert Everett plays the main character, a gravedigger who lives on-site so that he can re-kill and prevent the dead escaping when they rise up again, however, the presence of the walking dead is actually one of the less weird things here as Everett later encounters the Angel of Death, who convinces him to instead murder the living, and as he comes across two women who are dead ringers for his recently deceased girlfriend, only to find that both want something from him other than true love as they initially profess. A very funny subplot additionally involves the town mayor running for re-election who wants to exploit his daughter's recent death to gain voter sympathy, but has to contend with her severed head coming back to life. Stefano Masciarelli provides a delightfully uncanny performance as the politician in question who believes himself to have godlike authority; "I command you as your mayor" he utters at an especially memorable point. Interesting as all this is, there remains room to wonder just what the filmmakers had in mind here with a plot that goes in several different directions all at once. The ending is especially baffling and while a macabre hospital visit in the final half-hour is a definite highlight, the film begins to feel less novel as it progresses. Still, this is a daringly different zombie movie in the best possible way and both the original underscore and sourced classical music here are great.

Michele Saovi's wonderfully weird and wacky, art house horror flick is also kind of a throwback to the Fantastique genre of the 1970s. Lush, beautiful cinematography, Surreal, Gothic piece about Francesco Dellamorte, engineer- oh, sorry, that's right, he doesn't like to be called that, he's a *caretaker*, at a small Cemetery, and he and his Joe Besser-lookalike helper have their hands full with The Returners, recently deceased who come back to life to devour the living, who can only be killed permanently by a bullet to the head. Dellamorte keeps experiencing visions of a mysterious, nameless girl with whom he falls in love, but then has to kill after she is attacked by a Returner. But she appears to come back yet again.....Atmospheric horror have some great effects, and some really weird touches of comedy, like Dellamorte reading the telephone books for fun and recreation, even going so far as to call them "classics"! (I thought I was odd because I read dictionaries for recreation) Things like that gives the film humour, as well as giving the characters nuances and depth, as does Dellamorte's inner monologue.

Cemetery Man suffered immensely in the United States from poor marketing by its American distributors. The title was changed to Cemetery Man from the original Italian title and given a schlock and camp-filled ad campaign painting the movie as just another zombie film in an already saturated market. Consequently it was released to critical and commercial failure.Instead of the campy zombie film most people were expecting when they bought their tickets, Cemetery Man delivers something much more rare: intelligent and thought-provoking ideas in a horror film. Yes, we do get our primitive desire to see zombie carnage (and then some) fulfilled but we also get something to think about.See this film if you are in the mood for a zombie flick but would also like something that offers a lot more substance than anything by Fulci and most Romero films post-1978. I recommend this to people who like zombie flicks but also those who like a good drama. Give it a chance, you won't be disappointed.