2. Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man)
I am not convinced there's a perfect reading of Dellamorte Dellamore out there, but kudos to its creators, who see this one through all the way to the very weird end of its mind-boggling conclusion. At first, everything seems pitched like an over-sexed version of Raimi's Evil Dead films, with ex-engineer Francesco Dellamore guarding the gates of a cemetery where the dead are constantly trying to escape. Life's a dreary slog for Francesco, dispatching the zombies, filling out paperwork, rinse and repeat, while his grave-digger accomplice Gnaghi trundles about in a blissful idiot's stupor. Without reciting the rest of the plot here, let's get down to it. Things get inexplicable real quick once Francesco's love is bitten and turned into a zombie. The final scenes, after much odd crap has gone down, feature Francesco finally trying to exit the suffocating town of Buffalore and leave the shadow of death behind him. At one point the Reaper himself shows up and asks Dellamore how he expects to escape him. What he and Gnaghi find through the tunnel to their freedom is nothing...nothing at all. The world just ends at a broken cliff, and they are seemingly trapped within a snow globe. When Francesco pulls two bullets and plans to kill himself and Gnaghi, something awakens the rotund mute and he becomes the voice of reason, throwing the gun away, as Dellamore can merely sit on the ground and mutter to himself unintelligibly. Combine this with imagery early in the film that showed Dellamore's twin in a hospital bed, dying, visions of Dellamore meeting his beloved as a prostitute he possibly murders, and you can begin to piece together a reasonable narrative of the subconscious trying to reconcile itself with oblivion. Francesco Dellamore, as it turns out, is on the verge of death the entire film, in a coma after going on a murder spree that began with a hooker he was having an affair with and ending with seven random people and his family. Now he's in a created hell of his own making, with the resurrected dead representing his own inability to process or come to grips with death and what he has done. In this land of mundane, repetitious functions and constant horror, Dellamore has split his soul into two sides. There's the contemptuous, miserable dark other, who we assume is the protagonist, and the unassuming, good-natured and genuine Gnaghi, who we take for the fool for a majority of the picture. When Dellamore's dark side has run as far as he can go, his other, more serene side--ready to face what's on the other side of the veil--takes the reigns and ushers in the resignation that will allow Francesco to rest at last.