Okay, forget the really cheesy American title ("Cemetery Man") and just pick it up if you ever see it. Anyone with an open mind and any mind at all should be able to like this film, if not for the bizarre story for Michele Soavi's incredible visual style, the perfect performances by Everett and Lazaro, or just as a plain, good old time.
"Dellamorte Dellamore" begins like a fun B-horror movie telling us of the care-taker of th Buffalora cemetery, Francesco Dellamorte. In the cemetery some dead people come back to life 7 days after burial, but, Dellamorte isn't too bothered by this, he just takes it as part of his job to put the dead back in the ground, answering his door with a gun in hand, ready to dispense some Grim Reaper-type justice. But, within the first three minutes we know from the visual complexity of the film that this won't be just any B-horror movie, and within the first ten minutes we get a glimpse of what is to come - a fascinating meditation on the difference (if any) between life and death, a philosophical look at insanity and loneliness, a recurring love story that grows more bizarre with each telling, and eventually a big old representation about how life is just what we make of it. The dead returning and the whole zombie thing is just a doorway into Dellamorte's world. Fortunately, it never takes itself too seriously, if it had it would be a dull bore, but thankfully Romoli throws in lots of wit and dark humor ("I'd give my life to be dead"), and Soavi never lets us get bored with his always moving, floating camera and elaborate but never over-done sets.
Everett gives one of the best performances in film history because it is so subtle, he delivers his lines with just the right amount of sarcasm, cynicism, and un-emotionalism (is that a word?) to pull off what was probably an incredibly difficult performance - but he does it perfectly. Francois Hadji-Lazaro, playing Dellamorte's mute and retarded assistant manages to build more of a character with his simple one word vocab of "Nyah" and his facial expressions than most big over-done actors/actresses in movies now-a-days. Anna Falchi is mainly there to provide mysteriously beautiful looks, which she does, in all three of her roles and all of her many lives and unlives. Soavi was the protogé of Italian horror-stylist Dario Argento, but in "Dellamorte Dellamore" he comes fully into his own with his own bizarre and incredible style. This isn't just a case of the student copying the teacher, in this case the student might have even surpassed the master. Ah, if only you could see one movie this life time.
