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“Gna gna, gna! Gna gna gna? Gna gna gna gna gna. Gna gna gna gna gna gna gna gna. Gna!”
I must apologize. That wasn’t very clear. There is a character in the film Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) named Gnaghi that conveys so much through this one word, “gna,” and no others. I guess I just don’t have his way with word.
Fortunately, Joe Bob had a plethora of words to use to describe the making of this film and the film itself. (Darcy subsequently described the film as “batshit crazy.”)
But before he got to talking about the film, JB’s preliminary rant was about cemeteries (aka graveyards, necropolises, catacombs, mortuaries, sepulchers, etc. He went through quite a list of synonyms.) JB expressed his affection for memorial gardens that went back, like so many things, to his days as a Boy Scout and visits to the final resting place of David O. Dodd, known in the South as a Child Martyr in the War of Northern Aggression (or, to the Union Army, a 17-year-old Rebel spy.)
Joe Bob launched into an oral tour of burial places around the world, from the Battlefield at Shiloh to ancient caves of Spain. He discussed the romantic appeal of ossuaries. (“Romantic” in the general sense, and in a more carnal sense in the film and, one was led to guess, in Darcy’s personal history.)
There was one further great distraction before JB could discuss the making of the film and the film itself. The set of The Last Drive-In was, for 11 years, the set of The Walking Dead. Apparently, quite a number of zombies still roam the grounds. (Is there a term for a great number of zombies? Should one call it a legion of zombies? Or a host of zombies? May I propose “a Romero of zombies”?)
Anyhoo, zombies kept making their way to the set, and so Joe Bob had to shoot them in the head with his ready revolver. Darcy questioned the wisdom of using a gun on the set, but Joe Bob assured her he had “Nine weeks of Firearm Safety from Vacation Bible School.” Throughout the program, Joe Bob proved himself a crack shot at dispatching ghouls (or “returners” as they’re called in the film).
Eventually, Joe Bob was ready to discuss the film, originally titled Dellamorte Dellamore (“About Death About Love”) which was given a different title in the States so it wouldn’t flop. It still flopped. He brought out a handy 15-point chart to explain how Cemetery Man came to be.
Point Numero Uno – Tiziano Sclavi – The comic book writer who started it all.
Point Numero Two-o – Fumetto – Italian comic books or graphic novels. Sclavi wrote a comic called Dylan Dog (Point Numero Three-o) which sold over a million copies. But then Joe Bob was interrupted again with not only zombies, but producer Austin, who insisted they needed to get on with the film.
Before the film was shown, of course, Joe Bob gave his Drive-In Totals:
An interesting permutation on the Breast Count for the evening (6), is that all the breasts belonged to the same actress, Anna Falchi. The reason they counted as six, rather than two, is that she played three different characters in the film, each getting nekkid.
Joe Bob eventually was able to tell how the film was made as director Michele Soavi (best known for his work assisting Dario Argento), screenwriter Gianni Romoli, and producer Tilde Corsi (at the time the wife of Italy’s prime minister) joined forces to produce what many consider the Last of the Giallos. (After this film, Italy became, one might say, a graveyard for horror films.)
The team scored a major casting coup with Rupert Everett in the role of Francesco Dellamorte. This was important because Dellamorte was based on the comic book character Dylan Dog. And the character Dylan Dog was drawn by Tiziano Sclavi in the likeness of Rupert Everett, after viewing the actor in the film Another Country. This might not matter to you, but to thousands of Dylan Dog fans in Italy, it mattered a whole lot.
It should be noted that the film isn’t actually based on the Dylan Dog comic but rather on a novel by Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore, while Sclavi did reuse the plot of his novel in a Dylan Dog comic. I trust that makes everything very clear.
The plot of the film involves a cemetery caretaker, Dellamorte, who must deal with “returners” (zombies) that tend to rise up after seven days. When he falls in love with the widow of the town’s mayor, and they make love on the mayor’s grave, and the mayor rises from the dead, well, complications ensue.
Dellamorte continues to kill zombies efficiently, so much so that Death himself pays a visit to demand that Dellamorte should “stop killing the dead” and instead kill the living. Dellamorte takes him up on this suggestion, and it has been suggested that the film’s initial lack of popularity in the U.S. might be due to Dellamorte becoming, shall we say, a rather unsympathetic character.
The original screenplay planned for an epic battle between Dellamorte and an army of the undead, but the budget ran out, so instead the film ended with Dellamorte and Gnaghi trying to drive out of town in a white Volkswagen Bug and finding that there is no real world to be found. And we see the two characters in a snow globe. It was perhaps all a dream. (But whose dream? Delamorte’s? Or perhaps Gnaghi’s dream? At the end of the film, Gnaghi can speak and Delamorte can not. Or was it all the dream of an autistic child? Fans of the TV show St. Elsewhere know what I’m talking about and the writers of the series finale of that program surely had grounds for a plagiarism suit.)
Back to the real world of the Drive-In, Darcy chose to cosplay Valentina, a young girl in the film who is decapitated, but whose re-animated head is kept by Gnaghi, her posthumous suitor. Because of the physical limitations of this cosplay, Joe Bob had to fetch his own mail.
Death himself also visited the set (cynical viewers might think it was John Brennan dressed as Death, which brings up an important real real-life situation. Our favorite musical director recently lost most of his belongings in a house fire. Fortunately, no people were hurt, but there is a GoFundMe account, if you’d like to chip in: Fundraiser for John Brennan by Matt Manjourides : Help John Brennan Rebuild After Fire (gofundme.com).
And so with some fairly bad jokes, the episode came to an end. But was it real or all a dream of our favorite Drive-In Critic?