The undead love

Dellamorte Dellamore - The Cemetery Man (1994)

I've never been a fan of Michele Soavi, but I think this one might be his best movie. It's a story about Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett), a caretaker of a cemetery somewhere in a small Italian town. Francesco has a problem, the dead buried on the cemetery seem to come back to life after a while and he needs to kill them again with the help of his mentally challenged helper Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). But that's not all, one day he meets She (Anna Falchi) a griefing widow who he falls in love with. The problem is that Francesco doesn't go out that much or meet any people, the undead keep him too busy for that, so the love becomes quite complicated, especially when She ends up dead. The style of this movie is a surrealistic horror comedy love story or something like that. It has a bit of everything in it and that's a good thing as it surely doesn't get boring. Rupert Everett is good and his character resembled a lot like Clive Owen's Dwight in Sin City (2005), I bet Robert Rodriguez has based at least a bit of that character to this one here. Though who knows as the comic book came out the same year, maybe it was Michele Soavi who based it on the Frank Miller's character, but as it's so different I kind of doubt it. Who knows and to be honest it doesn't even matter. Can't say the same about the rest of the cast, though Anna Falchi was quite pleasing for the eyes. The style as in most Soavi's movies is again great, the cinematography by Mauro Marchetti was at times simply brilliant. There's plenty of comedy and enough twists to keep a constant "what the hell is happening?" expression on my face. So in the end this is a great little horror comedy, well worth watching.
78%

Horror in the theatre

Stage Fright (1987)

Michele Soavi should know his giallos, being the assistant director to the maestro himself Dario Argento before wandering off to do his own movies. This is his first feature movie and surely enough it shows that he has the style quite well in hand. So the style of the movie is surely not the problem, it's pretty much everything else. The cast is quite horrible, well the dubbed english audio might have something to do with it also, but still the cast felt quite wooden. The story was a bit too stupid to help the enjoyment either. Don't know why they thought it's good to show the killer right from the start. Kinda misses the whole point of a "whodunnit", guess the director was trusting his visual style to keep the interest up. But the thing is that you know who the killer is and you see that the people "trapped" in the theatre are complete idiots as they can't get out so there's not much to get excited about. Still the killer wants to wear a huge owl mask, even though everyone already knows who he is. Guess it's just for the style then. Sure the style was fine and the movie has it's moments but it's a bit too idiotic to keep the interest up throughout it.
30%