Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is drifting through life. No college degree — no high school degree, even. He admits that he’s only ever read two books in his life. One, he didn’t finish, and the other was the phone book. Did he finish that?
A dead end life inevitably leads one to a dead end job. In Francesco’s case, that’s as caretaker for the cemetery in the Italian town of Buffalora. His assistant is Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), a sensitive idiot whose only spoken words are the first syllable of his name, spat out like a child saying, “Nyaa!”
It would be a normal and dull job if all the pair had to do was bury the dead and keep graves clean, but, in Buffalora, the dead have the habit of coming back to life and clawing their way out into the light. So, every night, Francesco and Gnaghi have the unenviable task of smashing the brains of the undead and sticking them back in their graves. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte dellamore”
According to the internet, so it must be true, Raffaele Donato, whose work in film had been very limited, decided one day that he would like to direct a movie. As it happened, Joe D’Amato was looking for someone to helm a cheap sharksploitation flick, the only requirement being fluency in English. Donato leapt at the chance, but after filming a single scene, decided life in the director’s chair was not for him. No worries, as the prolific D’Amato was ready to step in and finish beating this dog of a movie to within an inch of its life.
Lisa and the Devil, the 1973 film from Italian auteur Mario Bava, has become one of his more renowned films in the last couple of decades. I first saw it around twenty years ago with a roommate who was watching it for her film class at NYU. Upon release, though, it was a butchered product, with a framing story shot and added after Bava delivered his cut. Of this film, which had been released under the title of La Casa dell’esorcismo (House of Exorcism), Bava said, “La casa dell’esorcismo is not my film, even though it bears my signature. It is the same situation, too long to explain, of a cuckolded father who finds himself with a child that is not his own, and with his name, and cannot do anything about it.”