Cemetery Man

I've never liked zombie movies. It’s not that they give me the creeps. They just don’t interest me. While I’m willing to concede the possibility of ghosts, though I doubt they exist, zombies are not possible. All I see in zombie films are badly made up actors who can’t get better parts.

Cemetery Man (1994) is a zombie movie that tries to be campy, as if zombie films aren’t that already. It also tries to be a satire, as if George Romero films weren’t satirical from the get go. Cemetery Man makes fun of boy scouts, bikers, politicians, village idiots, bus wrecks, headless accident victims, large-breasted women, and introspective, self-absorbed protagonists—Rupert Everett plays that role here, as Francesco Dellamorte. And, of course, it satirizes zombie films, even as it tries to be one.

Everett, who took this role before he began playing Oscar Wilde characters, spends most of the film overseeing the cemetery where he works and shooting zombies in the head or hitting them with shovels. For reasons never made clear, zombies are rising out of their graves and stalking around. If a zombie bites you, you die.

About two-thirds of the way through the film, Dellamorte seems to tire of killing zombies. Every possible plot permutation has been exhausted. So the film veers off in the David Lynch direction. The figure of death suggests that Dellamorte kill living people, so he does that for a while. Then he and his sidekick drive through a long and endless tunnel that ends on the verge of a precipice that seems almost infinitely deep. Then the credits roll.

Low-budget, pretentious, wandering, incoherent, and enlightened with all too infrequent moments of wit and inventiveness and small moments of intelligence, Cemetery Man is an idea stillborn. It should have been buried in the dead of night, quietly, the raw dirt quickly covered over, a gardenia planted there to hide the spot.