Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the caretaker of a cemetery in the sleepy Italian town of Buffalora. What would normally be a simple undertaking (no pun intended) with the assistance of his mentally deficient assistant Gnaghi is made all the more complicated because within seven days of being buried, corpses are coming back to life as zombies. Francesco must then kill them again with the help of a bullet, or something similar, to the head, and bury them again. It’s a simple yet lonely life for Francesco, he quietly kills the zombies and keeps it to himself, afraid that telling the town’s mayor would cause the cemetery to be closed down and he and Gnaghi would be out of a job. His shallow existence, lacking any real direction, takes a major change when he sees the young wife of a recent addition to his cemetery. Stunned by her beauty, he attempts to approach her when she visits her husband’s grave, eventually winning her over. They end up making love next to the resting place of her deceased hubby, but then he rises from it in fury and bites her, she dies soon after and he Francesco must endure having to shoot his own true love when she herself rises from the dead. Francesco’s life becomes further complicated when the mayor’s daughter and several of her friends are involved in a hideous accident when their motorcycles collide with a bus full of boy scouts, which killing many in a huge bloody massacre. Now Francesco’s cemetery is full of corpses that could rise at any minute, Gnaghi has fallen in love with the disembodied head of the mayor’s daughter, and his dead love might not be as dead as he thought.

Nice short plot synopsis for this one for two reasons: there’s too much going on to talk about in this movie; and there’s also no coherent plot as such to speak of. Many genre fans are going to be very disappointed with me. I have seen views which have expressed that those who don’t love this film like a son are superior-minded movie snobs who don't "get it". Now the "you just don’t get it" argument annoys me immensely (beacuse it is meaningless) but yeah whatever, I just don’t get it, happy? Based on a novel which I’m assuming is a great deal better, Dellamorte Dellamore is full of metaphors for philosophies regarding life, love and death, studying Francesco’s detachment from the real world and his increasing inability to differentiate between the living and the dead, and who he has a right to kill. It also tackles feelings of loss, ideas of self-identity, and even injects some humour from time to time. My problem with this film? With all the symbolism, metaphor, and philosophical ramblings, the plot is an absolute incoherent mess. The stop/start narrative of the film frustrated me no end as the film consists of little more than a series of vaguely connected encounters and occurrences which fizzle out shortly after they happen. Every time I was made to think that perhaps we were going to get some semblance of a narrative, the film stops dead and starts all over again. I could list several points in the movie where I thought the actual plot was going to kick in, but then its cut short and we’re back to Francesco’s tedious ramblings (I like Everett but his character was irredeemably unpleasant, creepy and annoying), the film refusing to take on any kind of recognisable form. There are plenty of films I have greatly enjoyed which didn’t have any plot to speak of, but they didn’t constantly bait me with a plot element, a promise of something more, only to discard it minutes later. It also didn't help that some scenes were just plain stupid, utterly infuriating and pointless (see the segment where he gets 'the injection', I mean what the hell?). By the one hour mark I was just getting sick of it, and by the time eighty minutes had passed I was just begging for this thing to end, which it did eventually, on a most odd and unsatisfactory (though visually striking) note, which I guess I just "don’t get", right?

Don’t get me wrong though, I honestly don’t hate this movie or anything, it just irked me. There were some aspects I did enjoy. First off, the Zombie Carnage™ was great fun, despite the limited budget there were some impressive gore effects, zombies are shot, have their heads mashed with shovels, all sorts of fun, just not enough of it due to the problems detailed above. I must attribute a great deal of the positives of this film to its director Michele Soavi who did a great job with the visuals in the film. Having worked alongside the likes of Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava in various secondary directing roles, Dellamorte Dellamore is believed to be one of his best work. Despite a rather limited budget, he crafts some fantastic-looking scenes using the simple sets and locations he had to utilise. A particularly memorable shot shows Francesco standing in front of the fallen wings from an angel that presided over someone’s grave, making them look as if they are attached to his back (see below). The film is very well shot overall, possibly the direction is far better than this film deserved, and it’s a great shame that Soavi has never gone on to achieve greater things like some of his colleagues, particularly Argento. As for performances, despite Francesco being extremely difficult to like, Rupert Everett is a very good actor and portrays his character well, and François Hadji-Lazaro (Brotherhood of the Wolf) puts in a great and very endearing performance as the innocent and bizarre Gnaghi – the only likeable character in the film. Everybody else is pretty functional, Anna Falchi as Francesco’s lover is, well, very attractive and lets leave it at that as there’s quite enough negativity in this review already.

An admirable attempt at a thoughtful and cerebral horror movie with a great deal of visual flair and some good zombie fun, but one that gets so caught up in philosophical reflection that the narrative really suffers for it. Maybe I don’t "get it", perhaps all the ideas of death and love, the associations between the two, and the effect of both upon the principle characters just went over my head. Or maybe it would have appealed to me a great deal more if it was contained in a stronger, more driven plot which developed the characters more, and had a central narrative with which to wrap these metaphors and ideas around. If I’m just a movie snob so be it, bit if a film is full of great ideas but doesn’t have the strength and depth of writing to carry it through, all those great ideas are going to be largely wasted. A stylish, over-ambitious failure.