"Cemetery Man"

Opens: May 10, 1996 | Rated: R

If Sam Raimi, director of the "Evil Dead" movies, were the kind of guy who hangs around in cafes reading Nitzche but still made goofy horror movies, he might come up with something like "Cemetery Man."

The film stars British heartthrob Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, the aptly-named caretaker of a cemetery in Italy where the dead rise as zombies soon after they're laid to rest.

Dellamorte figures it's part of his job to see that the dead stay dead, so he spends his nights splitting the heads of the recently risen and putting them back in the ground.

Sick and funny, but inconsistent on both counts, "Cemetery Man" pulls you in nonetheless with tweaked characters and twisted philosophy.

Dellamorte starts to wonder about his lot in life when he has sex with a beautiful young widow her on her husbands grave and she dies of shock as her husband comes crawling out of the ground while they're in the act.

Business picks up and things get even weirder when a motorcycle gang collides with a bus of boy scouts, leaving no survivors.

Soon the caretaker and his assistant, an Igor-ish gimp mute (what else?), are up to their eyeballs in zombies and what's worse, Dellamorte meets two women who look exactly like his unfortunate lover (both of them played by Falchi as well), which sets his mind and his heart racing.

From there "Cemetery Man" takes off in several directions at once, like Fellini after too much coffee.

Although confusing and contorted, "Cemetery Man" is definitely an E-ticket for those who like their humor dark and bloody, but beware of horrible translations in the scenes with the townspeople that are dubbed from Italian. Most of the peripheral characters are so bad you wouldn't wish them on Russ Meyer.

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