Rupert Everett (yes, THAT Rupert Everett) plays Francesco Dellamorte, an average, but well-muscled guy who works as a caretaker in a spooky old cemetery. For unclear reasons which Dellamorte has no interest in investigating, the recently buried rise from their graves as flesh-craving zombies and Dellamorte and his chubby sidekick have to send them back to the land of the dead. One could alert the authorities, but the way he sees it, they’ll just close the cemetery, and he’d be out of a job. The undead are easy enough to dispatch; they deanimate when their heads are cracked open via gunshot or a spade wound, and Dellamorte even earns overtime for the work.

If it sounds like a Sam Raimi film, it looks even more like one on the screen. Everett, frequently shirtless with floppy hair and long face, strikes a very Bruce Campbellian vibe, and his character has Ash’s everyman cool and his hilariously logical point-of-view about the whole destroying the undead gig (In one classy scene, Dellamorte chats on the phone with a pal, casually shooting round after round, while one zombie after next lumbers through the front door of his house). But this very European production by director Michele Soavi bears its mostly Italian roots on its sleeve, with some good and bad results. A Hollywood production of the same concept might have been more conventional and less willing to be so witty about sticking shovels into people’s brains, but it have also been more disciplined about adding so many characters and unrewarding subplots.

Things fall apart pretty quickly; once the kooky premise is set up, it only takes a few scenes to introduce the most intriguing but ultimately disappointing subplot about a mysterious widow who visits her dead husband’s grave and tantalizes Dellamorte with her beauty. After a few scenes where she is utterly disgusted by his aggressive flirting style, she meets with him, then has sex with him in the graveyard on top of her husband’s grave. The unorthodox grieving process doesn’t make much sense, but it creates some very interesting possibilities involving reanimated dead and lost love. But Soavi’s botches the payoff, and reuses this theme several other times throughout CEMETERY MAN and each time it is undone by bizarre plot twists coupled with some bad acting. Also, it is amusing for the hero not to care about anything he’s required to do, but if he doesn’t feel anything is at stake, neither do we.