Directed by: Michele Soavi
Written by: Tiziano Sclavi, Gianni Romoli
Starring: Rupert Everett, Francois Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi
Dellamorte Dellamore “Of Death, Of Love”
Spanish version was titled, “My Fiancé is a Zombie”
Francesco is the Buffalora Cemetery watchman, and he lives at the cemetery. The dead keep getting up, seven days after death, and he has to keep these “returners” down. You have to split their heads open. He works with Gnaghi, a simple-minded man who rakes leaves all day.
One day, he sees a beautiful woman in one of the funeral processions. He catches her visiting the grave later and learns that it was her husband that dies.
“At a certain point in life, you know more dead people than living.”
“This cemetery is small, but its got a marvelous ossuary!” She wants to see his ossuary. She says, “You know, you’ve got a real nice ossuary here.” She runs outside amid the floaty-fireball things (ignis fatuus), and they have sex on her husband’s grave under the full moon in the cemetery.
Meanwhile, just beneath them, the dead husband wakes up, but he’s been dead for more than seven days. He crawls out of the grave, and the girl is bitten. he swears “Nothing can separate us. Nothing. Not even death,” and then she dies.
The police are wildly incompetent, and he’s allowed to keep the body (he is after all, the cemetery man). He keeps her on a table in the ossuary and talks to her all the time. She sits up and he has to shoot her in the head.
There’s a bit of drama when Gnaghi gets a crush on the Mayor’s daughter and pukes all over her. The puked-on girl rides off with the local bikers and gets run over by a bus, which promptly drives off a cliff. Lots of dead folks!
Song: ”Never should have gone on the Boy Scout picnic”
That night, he’s attacked by an entire Boy Scout troop. They don’t wait seven days any more. They’re outside later, and the bikers, too, have returned: buried with their motorcycles of course. Dead Claudio stops to pick up his living girlfriend and then rides off.
Gnaghi, still infatuated with the Mayor’s daughter, digs her up. He pulls her head off by mistake, and she explains her name is Valentina. Her head follows him around now.
Francesco runs into his dead-undead-dead-again-undead-again girlfriend, who is not dead again. She bites him just as Gnaghi hits her in the head with a shovel. He thinks he actually killed her when he shot her the first time— she hadn’t been dead when her husband bit her. Francesco was bitten, and nothing has happened to him.
Francesco has a vision of the angel of death, who tells him to prevent the dead from rising by shooting living people. He goes to town and kills seven people. The police thing Gnaghi did it, so when they come to question him, Francesco sees he’s put Valentine’s head in the broken TV. She yells loud enough for the Mayor to find her. She bites the mayor, killing him. Francesco kills Valentina and the Mayor. Of course, that night he gets to kill the mayor a second time.
..and this is where it starts to get weird…
The new Mayor’s secretary looks just like Francesco’s multi-dead girlfriend. She comes to see him, saying it feels like she’s been there before. She believes the town gossip about him being impotent, and she can only love an impotent man. He goes to the surgeon to have it removed. The doctor gives him a shot that will make it just “go away” for a month.
Right after, she tells him that here phobia is gone, and she likes real men.
Soon after, he runs into yet another girl who looks just like the other two. After sex, she asks for 200,000 lira. Instead, he sets the place on fire. Someone else confesses to this, and Francesco is not happy about it.
Francesco decides he’s had enough and plans to leave the cemetery. He and Gnaghi pack the car and they are off the next morning. They go through a tunnel to leave town, and when they reach the other side, they have a surprise. The rest of the world doesn’t exist. Gnaghi falls down dead.
He’s not dead. They’ve traded places.
This is just a fun movie. Unlike “The Stuff” a few weeks ago, this is intentionally clever and witty. Some of Francesco’s line are delivered in a perfect deadpan, and Gnaghi is a perfect foil. Still, there’s enough mystery and danger to make it interesting and keep it from being too comedic. The end? I have no idea what that was about, but it was memorable.
This is an easy 8/10 if you like you horror a little on the funny side.