No one understands dream logic quite like an Italian horror filmmaker.  The 1994 horror comedy Cemetery Man might visually recall fellow zombie splatstick titles like Evil Dead & Dead Alive, but it updates that sensibility with a distinctly 90s sense of apathetic cool and then heavily distorts it through the Italo-horror dream machine.  Director Michele Soavi’s calling-card films Stage Fright & La Chiesa unmistakably belong to a tradition of post-giallo schlock in which the surreal scene-to-scene whims of his narratives are an expected part of the territory, but Cemetery Man is just generic-looking enough that those impulses feel remarkably out of place.  A contemporary of fellow horror-dreamers Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci, Soavi makes films that are just as logically sound as Suspriria or The Beyond, which can be confounding when you’re expecting the standard beats of a non-Zombi zombie film.  It’s the perfect midnight movie in that way, its lingering memory indistinguishable from the movie your dreaming mind would have assembled if you fell asleep halfway through.  It would be redundant to say that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream, since it very clearly is a dream that just happens to be on celluloid.

Rupert Everett stars as the slacker caretaker of a small cemetery where the dead have an annoying habit of rising from the grave within 7 days of burial.  He’s been working the job long enough that he’s bored with the routine, barely bothering to turn around from his writing desk to shoot the undead ghouls in the head and put them out of their supernatural misery.  That indifference to his work is somewhat surprising, given that there’s no real consistency to the zombie phenomenon.  Some of the “Returners” can continue talking & operating as a severed head, while most just groan incoherently and die the instance their heads are damaged.  The 7-day rule also has no real effect on who rises when, since Soavi is much more invested in the momentary pleasures of a visual gag than he is in the overarching logic of his narrative (an attitude a lot of movies would benefit from adopting).  The part of Everett’s job that really bothers him is that he has to pretend to be impotent so that local townies don’t assume he’s being sexually inappropriate with the corpses.  This gets in the way of his romantic life, of course, placing the handsome young bachelor on the same level of desirability as his unwashed, mentally disabled assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro).  Cemetery Man starts with standard zombie attacks, then swerves into sweaty nightmares about male sexual performance anxiety, then swerves again into existential crisis for a last-minute stab at profundity.  I haven’t been this jostled by a movie’s narrative trajectory since I watched Argento’s Opera in the exact same movie theater last October, a huge smile beaming on my face in both instances.

If there is any unifying theme to Cemetery Man that ties it all together, I do think it’s lurking somewhere in its detached, apathetic 90s slackerdom.  Everett spends the entire movie grumbling about working a boring job where nothing he does natters, to the point where there’s “no difference to being alive or dead.”  Later, he tests this theory by actively sending fresh corpses to his workplace as a mass murderer (after some quippy negotiations with Death itself) and is frustrated to find that there are no consequences to his actions.  Every time he confesses his crimes to the local detective, he’s met with bemused chuckling.  Overall, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of the plot, but that pointlessness plays directly into the disaffected nihilism of the slacker era.  Everett’s line reading of “I’d give my life to be dead” first sounds like a clever play on words until you realize it doesn’t actually mean anything, and then that lack of meaning starts to mean Everything.  When he spends his evenings reading the phone book as if it were literature, it’s mostly a joke about how he only sees other living people as potential Returners that he’ll later have to execute, but it’s also a joke about the banality of his daily routine.  All jobs and lifestyles are ultimately boring, I guess, regardless of their supernatural circumstances.

The poster for Cemetery Man promises “Zombies, guns, and sex, oh my!”, and I suppose the movie technically delivers on all of those promises.  Anyone looking for a non-stop splatstick free-for-all based on that tagline would likely be much better served by Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though.  Cemetery Man is a much calmer, more slippery kind of vintage zombie novelty: the kind best experienced half-awake on late-night cable, so that you’re tormented for years with vague questions if the movie actually exists or if you made it up in a dream.  Its limited distribution over the past couple decades has only amplified that effect, but there’s now a Severin restoration making the theatrical and home video distro rounds, so there’s evidence that this movie does, in fact, exist and is just as weirdly dreamy as you remember.

-Brandon Ledet