a review of 魔诫坟场

ℍ𝕆𝕆ℙ𝕋𝕆𝔹𝔼ℝ 𝔼𝕃𝔼𝕍𝔼ℕ ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋 𝕋𝕎𝔼𝕃𝕍𝔼: A much weirder watch than I was anticipating! Starts off as a pretty standard-seeming '90s horror-comedy with Rupert Everett playing a solitary working-class cemetery caretaker (also apparently Italian in spite of having a crisp English accent?) who deals with an apparent zombie incursion the same way a warehouse worker might deal with a recurring rat or cockroach problem. He's also madly infatuated with a woman whose much-older husband was just buried a few days earlier, and will soon rise from the dead; So I thought OK, this is basically MOONSTRUCK crossed with Romero, nothing too wild here. The film basically takes off nonsensical directions from there, including Everett's mute assistant romancing the mayor's deceased daughter, a deeply strange murder plot, and some slightly wiggy psychosexual themes around impotence and castration, before ending on a meta note that's somehow reminiscent of both AMERICAN PSYCHO and DARK CITY. Like HOUSE, the comedic tone all over the place, but I found this one held together better when I realized that it was likely replicating the episodic nature of its source material (the novel DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE by the creator of DYLAN DOG, Tiziano Sclavi) rather than feeling like a first draft thrown before the camera.