Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore)

 

Picture: C     Sound: B-     Extras: C     Film: B+

 

 

Cemetery Man is a film that I’d been waiting very anxiously to see once again, as it had been out of print on VHS for quite some time.  When it finally came time for its much-delayed release to Region 1 DVD, I was elated to get hold of this one at last.  Disappointment was already setting in, however, once I saw that Anchor Bay had not even bothered to include a translated version of director Michele Soavi’s commentary from some of the foreign DVD editions.  No care was taken for even the cover artwork, as they have merely recycled the bland U.S. VHS box art rather than select something more compelling to draw in the uninitiated viewers. Why the long delay in getting this to the shelves?  It’s been a considerable length of time since the company had announced they were giving this beloved film a special edition treatment; and despite that lapse of time, very little was accomplished to make this gem of a film stand out in the marketplace.

 

This movie, created in the early 90’s, is a beautiful piece of film that was directed by Michele Soavi, who had done work alongside of Dario Argento, as well as other prominent figures in the Italian horror industry.  While he had also directed a few films of his own up to the point of Dellamorte Dellamore, he hadn’t really achieved much of a name for himself within the U.S. Some of his most notable work would be the direction of 1989’s The Church, as well as being an assistant director to Terry Gilliam on both The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, as well as the recent, but shoddy, Brothers Grimm.  The breathtaking scenes of the angel of death within the prior film are most noteworthy, and really seem to showcase his style of direction, but largely because those scenes are also in keeping with subject matter he is familiar with.

 

The picture quality for this release is really sub-par, and not at all what I was expecting.  To my knowledge, this is the only edition of the film that is anamorphically enhanced, but I haven’t seen any of the other releases and am unable to compare it with anything else.  The image is consistently obscured by a muddy presentation, and lacks a lot of detail.  The video black is really choppy in many spots, and really shines the digitization in a bad light.  Perhaps a little of the murky look was done for stylistic reasons, and it matches up with my memory of the old tape version.  But somehow I doubt that this is the best the film has ever looked in it’s existence, and I’m sure it was intended to appear much more clearly than shown here.

 

The sound is also lackluster, and the 5.1 surround sound mix doesn’t compliment the film very well.  Most of the time it feels very much like the old 2.0 stereo mix that I was previously accustomed to, and the surrounds have that muddy resonance that really hinders the immersive effect the movie should embody.  The sound on this edition could’ve really heightened the strange presence that this movie embodies, but as it is, it falls flat and goes nowhere toward helping it along.

 

The extra features on this edition are pretty boring, and the “Death Is Beautiful” featurette flies by really fast.  There were several moments where I had to back up the video because there was something being translated that I couldn’t read fast enough to catch, which seemed to be due to some poorly timed captioning.  As I mentioned earlier, Michele Soavi’s commentary track was not translated for whatever reason, and no new one was created for this edition.  There are several aspects that could’ve been covered in different commentary tracks, as the effects technicians surely had more to say, as would the actors, the director - obviously, and most definitely Tiziano Sclavi, creator of the Dylan Dog comic that spawned the genesis of his Francesco Dellamorte character.  A shame that none of these insightful tracks ever came to be.

 

Despite the many problems with how this movie has been presented, it’s still very much worth it to rush out and buy, as it truly is once of the last great horror movies made within any recent span of memory.  The shame of it is that whoever was in charge of this title over at Anchor Bay didn’t put the amount of love into this that fans of the film surely expected, and for that I feel a bit let down.

 

 

-   David Milchick