 Hello and welcome to today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies and today we have a special Patreon request by Matt and we're gonna be talking about Cemetery Man. But first, what are we drinking? Uh, we're drinking the Heretic, smoked lager. Burn them witches. Ha ha, damn right. This movie was directed by Michel Suavey and he did The Church, which we covered. Click the link above. And he did Stage Fright, just to mention a couple. It stars Rupert Everett and he's actually moved on from the horror genre and mostly done rom-coms after this. François Adagilorazo, let's hope I pronounced that right, is also in this. He's kind of a character actor and a musician and he was also in City of the Lost Children. So Cemetery Man, also called Delamorte Delamore, starts off with Francesco Delamorte. He's narrating, we learned that he's the caretaker of the cemetery with his helper, Noggy. As he's narrating all of this, a zombie walks through the door and he pulls out his gun and boom, blows him away. These zombies in the cemetery that he's been tasked to look after keep coming up every seven days or so. Just his job. Just a job. Just a job. A body gets delivered to the cemetery. There's this beautiful widow all dressed in black with the veil and everything. Francesco really falls for her and she's very upset. She's very distraught. And so she leaves the cemetery, but she comes back after. Man, oh man, he works fucking extra fast. Like Jesus, they're all laying on those tombstones and everything with like huge epic moment on her husband's grave. The show is picture. He's old. He's all old. While they're in the act, the husband actually comes out of the ground and he ends up biting her. So naturally Francesco and Noggy, they end up killing the husband and she passes out. They put her in all these veils and everything and all this weird shit. Bring her into the crypt. He's super distraught. She starts to actually rise and he's got the gun. And naturally he thinks because she's been bitten. Well, she must be a zombie now. He ends up shooting her. Francesco ends up meeting the mayor, his whole entourage, his daughter. Noggy's like really taken with the daughter. He's all crying and everything. He ends up just puking all over the daughter. Then she's like, oh, that's all right. She just gets on her boyfriend's motorcycle and takes off. What's funny is that the boyfriend is fine with her getting on and she's full of puke. I'd be like, no, no, no. Hold on. So the mayor's daughter is on this big joy ride with her boyfriend and a bunch of other motorcyclists. A bus full of tourists comes out of nowhere and accidentally takes out the whole bike gang. Drives over me. See all her skulls crushing. And then they go like over a cliff. So like everyone fucking dies. There's this whole bus load and bike gang worth of corpses that are new to the cemetery. Francesco knows he's got his workhead out for him here and see them start to surround the little shack and he's just sitting there on his couch just waiting for him to come through the door. Talking to his friend and all nonchalant. Because Noggy's so in love with the mayor's daughter he hopes she's going to come back to life too and he kind of digs her up and she's in this like nice glass coffin. She's actually revived. He's all happy to see her and goes to go pull her out of the casket but just her head comes out. He pulls her head right off. But he doesn't really seem to care. He takes the head down to his little dwelling and puts it in the broken TV. The mayor comes to the cemetery. He's got this big plan that boosts his campaign so people are sympathetic to him. He's going to have a picture taken with the like exhumed grave with like the corpse. There's no head. It's just a body here. And he flips out. It smells funny in here. It goes downstairs in Noggy's area. Well, he's got the head in the fucking TV like Jombie from Peewee's Playhouse. Your daddy's here. The head flies out of the TV and he's going to view shot through the teeth and like bites the mayor. Well, now they got to kill the mayor. At this point, Francesco is starting to go a little off the rails. He's having these crazy dreams. He is going into the village and killing people before they're actually dead. Get it done with before he has to deal with it in the cemetery. Detectives start coming around and asking about these murders that are happening and he's realizing, well, that's the murders I dreamt about. The new mayor shows up with his new secretary who is the exact same woman that he fell in love with earlier and had to kill. And that's where we're going to end it. So if you want to see what happens at the end of Cemetery Man or Delamorte Delamore, watch the movie because there's actually a lot more that still happens. It's actually, it's packed full of stuff. Yeah. But why should you watch Cemetery Man? One of the biggest reasons is that it's a different take on the whole zombie myth. It almost sucks you in thinking that it's going to be using the same tropes from Romero movies, right? The Romero rules. Yeah, yeah. Where you get, if you get bit, well, after a certain amount of time, you turn back into a zombie. I was even fooled and I wrote it down, follows Romero's tropes. Then it didn't. I was like, oh, yeah. When you're bit, it doesn't mean you're going to turn like right away. You're not infected. Yeah. Francesco gets bit like halfway through the movie, but he doesn't turn. They're zombies, but it's not like a big plague that's going to take over the whole world. But it could. It could. But it just seems to be happening at this one particular little cemetery. And it's just like an isolated incident. And it's just a man's job to take care of it. There's a daytime setting and a nighttime setting. The daytime is very bright. You get to see life. But at night, things are foggy, misty, sort of trapped. The cemetery is a great fucking setting. And they actually filmed it on a real cemetery, but they still had to build it up and make it look more elaborate. That crypt with all the skulls. Fucking amazing. Fucking crazy. And then there is Francesco and Nagi's little hut that they live in, which is a great setting. You really feel the kind of like they're living in squalor and strong lead. And you kind of really get this misery that he's in. Everybody's life who has a daytime job. You have this kind of like repetitive thing you have to do over and over again. But his is different because he's like killing zombies all day and having to manage his cemetery and take care of Nagi too. And Nagi is a great character too. Even though he doesn't say anything. He's super memorable. He's kind of like the living dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has to be looked after, drags Francesco down a bit. Yeah, because Nagi doesn't really like carry his own weight. There's that great scene where Nagi's like watching TV and shoving all his food and he puts together that plate with all that spaghetti and all the bread and all this like weird shit. And he's just eating. And poor Francesco is fighting off all these zombies and he's just sitting there. Yeah, he has no idea what's going on. There's kind of a bit of a social commentary too. I'm like, yeah, just sitting there in front of the TV stuffing your face while this guy does all the work. Well, while the world is going on around you, right? Yeah, you're blivvious to everything. Exactly. It's dark humor, but it's also not you crammed down your throat. When you're in that post office, guys like, well, let me get you out of those forms. They zoom out to the back and there's all those paper stacks. Like super and then the window is open. They're all blowing everywhere. What did I put that? It's like, well, you'll never find it. Yeah, the way they place the humor and the way to do it is quite brilliant. Like that scene and that scene where Noggy is trying to rake up those leaves in the wind and they're trying to keep them all in that wheelbarrow. Yeah, and he's narrating too. He's like, he has a thing about leaves. They're all blowing away. They don't use the humor to follow a scary part. The humor is sort of midway between plot points, which is perfectly fine. It's very much at his heart a dark comedy. I was laughing so hard at many parts because I was supposed to. The zombies look great. I love the zombie design. Roots growing out of his head. That biker zombie that comes, he's got all those like wires, all the metal sticking out from the crash. Francesco and Noggy, they also attach like bells to these guys. Kind of harks back to like the 1800s when they used to bury who they thought was vampires. So then you know they're coming back to life and you can go and kill them. And the movie looks fantastic. A visual orgasm almost. Especially that damn crypt. Yeah, it's so well shot. Some shots in there is like, how did they do that? Must have taken like days to just put a small scene together. The music in this is great and it is very original. I can't think of a score that sounds like this. The score is almost just as weird as the movie, which is great. It's a great compliment to how weird the movie is. It parts synth score, but there's also like a lot of acoustic instruments too, but it doesn't follow any horror movie tropes. It's its own thing. It stands on its own. It's a weird movie. I won't deny that it's a weird movie, but I wouldn't say it doesn't make sense. I think it makes perfect sense and I think it's pretty obvious what the movie's trying to say. Pretty obvious because Francesco says a lot of that in his narration. One of the biggest things too is that this movie deals with love, life, and death. And there's no life without love and death. You can't have any of them without the other. Yeah, and you can't escape it. There's like this kind of snow globe motif in the movie. Obviously saying you can't escape that. You can't escape love and death. The main character Francesco is continuously seeing the same thing over and over again. Means in life, you can't escape certain things either. Yeah, you can't escape love and once you're in love with somebody, it's always there. It's saying it in a weird way and I'm completely fine with that. It's saying it in a very visual, very smart, humorous way. They get the point across perfectly. I hadn't seen Cemetery Man since like 1999 or something like that. I remember renting it on VHS and really liking it. And I have no clue why I never bothered to watch it again. So I'm really glad it was suggested to us. Just when you think that nothing new can be done with the zombie genre, a movie like this comes along and fucking changes everything. If you love like Italian horror movies with great visuals and want something smart that has something to say about life and love, well, fuck, watch the Cemetery Man. It's a cerebral movie that's also like a visual orgasm at the same time. So thanks for requesting this movie. It was a lot of fun. And until next time, keep drinking.