Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man in the US) has been called “the last great Italian horror movie.” It’s director Michele Soavi’s 1994 surreal masterpiece and Severin has given the film a gorgeous 4-disc 4K UHD restoration that is to die for.
Rupert Everett is laconically sexy as the love-starved watchman of the Buffalora Cemetery who, along with his mute, mentally-challenged sidekick Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), spends evenings shooting bullets into the heads of “returners”- corpses who claw out of their graves after seven days of burial. Everett is Francesco Dellamorte, the “St. Francis of the dead,” in this macabre, visually stunning film by Michele Soavi. Soavi, once the assistant to the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, had directed several exceptional shockers (Stage Fright, The Church and The Sect). This delirious, crackpot film has the rambling logic of a disturbed Romantic poet’s fever dream. “At a certain point in life, you realize you know more dead people than living,” bemoans Dellamorte after he blows a hole through the skull of a reanimated Boy Scout in this unique cinematic marriage of Samuel Beckett and George Romero.
The genesis was a wildly popular comic book series in Italy called Dylan Dog by Tiziano Sclavi about a “Nightmare Investigator” battling all things supernatural. Ironically the main character was actually patterned after Rupert Everett. One of the early incarnations of this Dylan Dog character was Tiziano’s novel Dellamorte Dellamore about a cemetery caretaker, and that’s what this film is based on.
In new interviews on the Blu-ray, director Michele Soavi discusses the making of the film and the great casting- from Rupert Everett, the gorgeous Anna Falchi to the unforgettable, mute, child-like Gnaghi, played by Francois Hadji-Lazaro– who was actually part of a rock band in France called The Butcher Boys. Soavi admitted he hadn’t come up with a suitable finale for the film. “The ending had to be something conclusive and poetic.” And what they eventually came up with was surreal perfection. “The ending is like that, sort of suspended between life and death and the rest of the world.”
Rupert Everett has never looked more beautiful than he does in the film and has the perfect blend of the “Byronic and ironic,” as he describes, feeling there was a lot of Joe Orton to the character. In the end, he calls Dellamorte Dellamore, “Completely unique. I don’t know another film that is like it. It’s really one of the films, I think, that I took part in that I feel really, really proud of. It scores on almost every level.”
The film that Martin Scorsese called “One of the best Italian films of the 1990’s” is given a spectacular deluxe box set with scores of extras and even a CD of the score by Manuel De Sica. If you don’t immediately order this Blu-ray from Severin I will personally come to your home and kill you.
Omg I better get a blu-ray player or invite myself over asap!