Michele Soavi is, unapologetically, a student of the Mario Bava school of splatter filmmaking. He's also taken electives from Sam Raimi, it seems. Cemetary Man is an Evil Dead redux, a blend of zombie gore, sex scenes, and tongue-in-cheek comedy.

The similarities to Evil Dead are uncanny. Even Rupert Everett looks a lot like Bruce Campbell, strutting around a cemetary with various firearms as he puts the dead to rest when they invariably rise as zombies, for reasons that remain largely unexplained. When he's not capping zombies, Francesco's busy hustling widows, few of whom have any problem getting naked in the moonlight and balling atop a mausoleum. With his sidekick Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), Francesco tirelessly works to bury the dead by day, then bury them again by night when they won't stay down.

Like Evil Dead the film is more comedy than horror, and fans of Raimi's classics won't be disappointed by the spin that Italian director Soavi puts on it here. Soavi is more into gore than Raimi, where zombification was more of a goof than anything meant to scare you. And he's also got an eye for the ladies. I've no idea where he dug up these actresses, but they are far beyond the usual desperate teenyboppers hoping to break into Hollywood that you find in American splatter films.

Fans of modern horror spoofs like Shaun of the Dead will find this a refreshing look back at the genre's infancy, and seeing Everett in an early, pre-out role also makes the film worthy of a spin. Anchor Bay's new DVD adds a new making-of featurette (largely in Italian), which gorehounds will positively devour.

Aka Dellamorte Dellamore.