Swirl together fashionable Freudianism, fright-night archetypes, pulp nihilism and romantic iconography. The result is a lavish truffle of a horror movie; dig in.
This blackly comic fantasy is equal parts morbid eroticism and gut-crunching violence. Style takes precedence over conventional storytelling, and the narrative -- more properly a series of vignettes on the twin themes of the carnal and the charnel -- is elegantly circular. Originally titled
DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (Of Death and Love), the film centers on its brooding antihero, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett). He's a handsome loner who lives in a graveyard where corpses have inexplicably begun rising from their mucky rest. Boy Scouts, bikers, businessmen and babes: As soon as they
come tapping at his door, the Cemetery Man sends them back to their tombs with a well-placed bullet or blow to the head.
The twin cornerstones of Dellamorte's universe are a beauty and a beast: The succulent She (model Anna Falchi), who appears in three successive guises and breaks his heart in each one, and the monstrous Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), a grotesque mute whose romance with a disembodied head is
funnier -- and more bizarrely touching -- than it has any right to be.
Inspired by a hugely popular Italian comic-book series (Umberto Eco reads it) and crammed with self-conscious allusions to everything from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to the pop surrealism of Rene Magritte, this is the kind of richly textured genre movie Americans don't seem to know how to make
anymore. But director Michele Soavi, who has worked with both Terry Gilliam and cult idol Dario Argento, successfully balances disparate influences, binding them together with unforgettable images of eerie, stylized beauty. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
