Dellamorte Dellamore is that old story of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl dies, girl comes back as a zombie, boy kills girl, girl comes back as a real zombie, boy realizes last time she wasn’t a zombie, boy kills girl again.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is the watchman of the Buffalora cemetery. In his cemetery (and perhaps elsewhere) seven days after their death corpses rise from the grave. Francesco, simply because it’s his job he supposes, kills the ‘returners’ and prevents them from over-running the small town.

It is quite hard to explain exactly what it is about this movie that I love. At a superficial level it has lots of zombies, heaps of violence and plenty of sex. But it’s also fused with this ridiculous Italian absurdity that I find addictive.

There are three particularly odd aspects that make the movie for me:

1. The way that unsubstantiated rumours are treated as absolutely true.
2. Dellamorte’s assistant Gnaghi, whose only word is Gna.
3. The film’s inexplicable ending,

Rumors

Some thugs in the town have spread the rumour that Francesco is impotent. When Anna Falchi’s character (listed in the title only as She) is killed by her zombie husband, the doctor’s examination reveals that she was having sex when she died. The police chief immediately excludes Francesco from suspicion, despite the death occurring in the small cemetery with nobody else around.

Later in the movie when Francesco starts to unhinge and shoots the thugs who started the rumour, the police chief finds Francesco with a gun and says: ‘Great, you’ve got a gun to defend yourself.’ Apparently his rumoured impotence extends to an inability to kill.

Gnaghi

Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) is a strange-looking, mentally handicapped man. One day he meets the Mayor’s daughter Valentina (Fabiana Formica) and falls in love with her. She is decapitated in a motorcycle accident the next day and when she rises from her grave, Gnaghi decides to keep her head in a hollowed out TV. The maintain a ‘relationship’ for months with Valentina only occasionally trying to bite him. Gnaghi is devastated when Francesco ultimately re-kills her when she begins to smell.

The Ending

At the end of the movie Francesco and Gnaghi finally decide it is time to leave Buffalora and discover the rest of the world. As they reach the city-limits the road gives out and there is nothing but a deep canyon. Francesco realises that there is no ‘rest of the world’, there is only Buffalora and working in the cemetery. There is no explanation for why Buffalora is the only place in the world, we only know that there is no escape for our heroes.

This movie made almost no money and received poor critical reviews. Nonetheless, like so many other strangely compelling genre movies, it is much better and way more rewarding than the figures suggest.

   -- Brad Crammond