CEMETERY MAN. Italy-France-Germany, 1994. Original title: Dellamorte Dellamore. Released in the US in 1996. Rupert Everett, François Hadji-Lazaro, Anna Falchi, Mickey Knox. Screenplay by Gianni Romoli, based on the novel by Tiziario Sclavi. Directed by Michele Soavi.

   Dellamorte means ‘of death’ and dellamore means ‘of love,’ and more than that I can’t really rationally explain about this sexy, arty, off the wall Italian horror film about love, passion, duty, friendship, and, of course, zombies.

   Francesco Dellamore (Rupert Everett) keeps the cemetery in Buffalora in Italy, which is more of a job than you might think, since every seven days the dead rise and he has to put a bullet in their brains and return them to their grave (no explanation is ever given and absolutely no one seems the least concerned with this curious arrangement) with the help of gentle mute giant grave-digger Gnagi (François Hadji-Lazaro). Dellamore is a handsome young man, and by now rather bored with his job and living by the decidedly creepy old town cemetery, but lacks the motivation to move on until She (billed only as She in the credits) shows up, Anna Falchi, whose husband recently died.

   Dellamore and the widow make love on the husband’s grave after which the husband rises and bites her. When she dies and comes back, Dellamore kills her again, but by now he wants away from this life and the gentle Gnagi has fallen in love with the daughter of the mayor. Some other complications ensue, including a Viagra moment for our hero, and with Dellamore seeing the woman he killed everywhere, the two men flee but their journey comes to an abrupt end with Gnagi supposedly dead. Dellamore can’t bring himself to kill his friend, but Gnagi wakes up, not having died, and the film ends as he throws Dellamore’s gun into an abyss as snow swirls around them and the two friends apparently choose to abandon zombie-killing and babysitting the dead as a chosen profession.

   This film is strange by any lights, informed by everything from giallo films to Italian adult digest sized horror comics, American road trip movies, and the offbeat philosophy of the author of the novel this is based on. What I can say about it is that it is curiously compelling with good performances by Everett, Falchi, and Hadji-Lazaro; creepy if never actually all that scary, sexy (and be warned there is full frontal nudity), and sweet and funny — for a zombie film.

   Imagine Fellini crossed with Mario Bavo or Dario Argento, add sexually graphic de Sadean Italian digest-sized horror and gothic fumetti like Isabella and Ullua (a female werewolf), a bit of Jesus Franco, throw in some zombies and explicit nudity and sex and you have Cemetery Man.

   Which is actually better than it sounds, if not a lot more sensible.

   Everett shows an ease on screen that belies his relative youth in this early film and commands the film, which is just as well since he is in most scenes, and Hadji-Lazaro proves a unique blend of endearing, creepy, sweet, and threatening as Gnagi, at times channeling Curly of the Three Stooges, whom he resembles a bit with a face at once sweetly innocent and somehow potentially threatening. Falchi’s role is thankless, but she is attractive and sexy and worth seeing nude. And while the film never really manages any scares or much in the way of gross-out terror or other horror film staples, it is often quirkily funny, thanks to the Laurel and Hardy routine between Everett and Hadji-Lazaro, good for a few frissons, and hard not to watch.

   I can’t really recommend this for anyone else. If anyone hates it, I have no problem with that either. It worked as a strangely compelling and twisted little film for me with attractive adults having sex (a step up from most American horror films with supposed teens dying because they did the nasty), a truly odd couple team-up, and, not to forget, zombies. Curiously I think that was exactly what it was intended to do and that it succeeds as what it was meant to be.

   I’m just not entirely sure what it was meant to be that it succeeds at doing so well, or that it really matters if I ever know.

Some notes of interest for the Mystery*File TV viewer.

CW – Since all programs are made by the studios that own the network (CBS and Warner Brothers) CW is slow to cancel. Only REIGN is in any trouble.

ABC – BLOOD AND OIL will end after 10th episode. QUANTICO has been picked up for a full season. NASHVILLE is in trouble as usual, but CASTLE is in danger due to its age and having its butt kicked by NBC’s BLINDSPOT. WICKED CITY, a series about a serial killer in 1982 Los Angeles, premieres Tuesday the 27th.

CBS – LIMITLESS has been picked up for a full season. CSI: CYBER is doomed. NCIS:LA is in trouble for the same reason as CASTLE (NBC’s BLINDSPOT).

FOX – MINORITY REPORT is gone after its tenth episode. ROSEWOOD has been picked up for a full season. SLEEPY HOLLOW, BONES and any sitcom are in trouble.

NBC – BLINDSPOT has been picked up for the season. THE PLAYER ends in mid-November. The network’s biggest problems are its sitcoms and its suicidal handling of THE BLACKLIST.

PBS – BBC’s SHERLOCK returns with a one episode special. “The Abominable Bride” will air January 1st.

Starz – DA VINCI’S DEMONS has just began it last season.

Midseason will be here before you know it.

B.A.D. CATS. “Pilot episode.” ABC-TV, 90m, 4 January 1980. (Season 1, Episode 1). Asher Brauner (Officer Nick Donovan), Steve Hanks (Officer Ocee James), Michelle Pfeiffer (Samantha ‘Sunshine’ Jensen), Vic Morrow (Capt. Eugene Nathan). Guest cast: LaWanda Page, Jimmie Walker, Charles Cioffi. Producer: Aaron Spelling.

   According to Wikipedia, the acronym B.A.D Cats stood for “Burglary Auto Detail, Commercial Auto Thefts.” Now that’s nice to know, since after watching this pilot episode, I couldn’t have told you. I might have missed it, but other hand, I was deliberately looking and listening, and I really don’t think it ever came up.

   But I admit I may have snoozed off. This is a TV show that makes you wonder why some shows ever manage get on the air. It is Not Very Good. It lasted six episodes before being deep-sixed, with four more ready to go and never aired.

   It is a wonder, though, that with very young Michelle Pfeiffer in it as the handy girl around the office, answering phones and looking pretty and the like, that no one has come out with an official set of DVDs for the series. Perhaps she has a good lawyer.

   This first episode has to do with a gang of crooks trying to smuggle a fortune of gold out of the country, and do to so they come up with a plan that involves faking the cops out by stealing a fleet of high-priced automobiles and shipping them overseas, while they are really…

   The fact that Jimmie Walker is in this as an inveterate car thief tells you right away that the story is played as much for laughs as anything else, along with one of the two stars’ infatuation with a water bed, with a worried downstairs lady neighbor who thinks the floor will give way. I don’t think it gives anything away to say that it does, to the hilarity of all.

   What should you expect to see otherwise? Lots of long car chases, that you bet your bottom dollar on. The last one I will concede is a doozy, but I should also warn you that it takes a long time to get there.

  A. E. MAXWELL – The King of Nothing. Fiddler & Fiora #7. Villard, hardcover, 1992. Harper, paperback, 1994.

   The “A. E.” stands for Ann and Evan, who are the husband and wife who together write the Fiddler books, and have written several others besides. Their characters are no longer husband and wife, but lovers still. Fiddler is wealthy, by somewhat shady means detailed in the first book in the series; Fiora is wealthier, by virtue of being a financial wheeler-dealer and entrepreneur. You might, without stretching things too far, look at them as a West Coast McGee and Meyer with a little sex and a lot of money thrown in.

   Which is not to say that the Maxwells together are another John D. MacDonald, because they aren’t. They do combine to write very good prose, however, and I have thought highly of the series to date.

   In the latest episode, Fiddler is fishing with an old friend at his place on the coast of Washington. One day the friend makes Fiddler aware that he is to be the executor of his estate, and the recipient of an old Samurai sword, a souvenir of war experiences. The next day the friend is found dead, apparently the victim of a break-in and robbery. The local police do not inspire Fiddler with confidence. Concurrently, Fiora has been in Seattle negotiating with a Japanese conglomerate to sell her financial firm.

   Aha, Samurai sword, Japanese firm — can there be a connection? Well, maybe. Several gory deaths later you find out.

   This wasn’t my favorite of the series, and I’m really not sure why. The plot was a tad far-fetched in places, but most books of this type suffer from that. The writing was competent as usual, and Fiddler and Fiora continue to be engaging characters. At one time I was afraid they were headed toward some of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser-Susan kind of foolishness, but the Maxwells seem to have drawn back in time.

   Oh well, some you like more than others, some less. Still recommended, as are the first six in the series.

      The Fiddler and Fiora series —

1. Just Another Day in Paradise (1985)

2. The Frog and the Scorpion (1986)

3. Gatsby’s Vinyard (1987)

4. Just Enough Light to Kill (1988)
5. The Art of Survival (1989)
6. Money Burns (1991)
7. The King of Nothing (1992)
8. Murder Hurts (1993)

This song comes from Judy Collins’ sixth LP, In My Life (1966), the album that served definitive notice that in spite of the cover, she was no longer just a folksinger. I think this is my favorite version of the song.

RICHARD MARSTEN – Vanishing Ladies. Permabooks, paperback original, 1957. Reprinted as by Ed McBain: Signet, US, paperback, 1976; Penguin, UK, paperback, 1982.

   I’ve owned the Permabook edition for a long time, but I’ve never read it, which has been my mistake for going on 50 years now, but I’ve made up for it by (as it happened) reading the British paperback from Penguin. (It’s a long story and a not very interesting one.)

   Once begun, at last, for a while I thought I was reading a small unknown gem. Well, not that unknown, since Ed McBain is a fairly big name as far as mystery fiction writers go, but a gem nonetheless. The ending doesn’t match the beginning, though, but Marsten/McBain (Evan Hunter) gives it his best shot, and he almost — but not quite — makes good on it.

   The story is told by Phil Colby, a cop from the city (presumably New York), who goes with his girl on a vacation the next state over. (I assumed it was New Jersey, but I may have been wrong.) First thing that happens is that he’s pulled over in a speed trap and is taken by a local motorcycle cop to an obviously crooked justice of the peace to pay a fine. He manages to keep his cool, but it’s an effort.

   Then he and his girl find a tourist camp of semi-attached cabins to spend the night. They are engaged, but since this is the 50s, they take separate cabins. He leaves his cabin later, only to come back to find a girl (not his girl) waiting for him. She’s young and pretty and she’s a hooker. And he can’t get rid of her. Fourteen pages of some tough unpersuasive conversation (on his part), he discovers blood seeping through the floor boards from the adjoining cabin.

   The door to the cabin next door is locked, and when Phil looks in the cabin where he left his girl, the cabin is empty. The manager says he (Phil) arrived alone, registered for one, and that another couple in in her cabin. (There is.)

   Eventually, after a lot of excited talk going on, mostly by Phil, they get around to checking out the bloodstains coming from the cabin next to Phil’s. Gone. Unable to have anyone believe him, Phil ends up in jail.

   This is about half way through the book, and I wish I could have told the story so far as well as Marsten-McBain did. He was a master on dialogue that can go on for a page or more with one line sentences going back and forth the way people really do talk, without a lot of he-said’s and he-replied, and you can never get lost as to who is saying what and when as you can easily do with a lot of other authors.

   I think that over half the book is dialogue, if you exclude an every-once-in-a-while six-page digression, such as the one about how life in the city differs from that in the country, the one that comes just before Phil’s friend Tony Mitchell (also a cop from the city) is bitten by a snake in a swamp.

   There is more than one missing lady, and that is the key to the plot that is being pulled on Phil. Unraveling it turns out to be a letdown when all is said and done, but the fun is in the reading, this time at the hand of a writer who really knew how to write.

CHARLES ERIC MAINE – B.E.A.S.T. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1966. Ballantine U6092, US, paperback, April 1967.

   â€œCharles Eric Maine” was just one of the pen names used by David McIlwain, whose books formed the basis of several rather dull SF movies, including Spaceways, The Mind of Mr. Soames and The Electronic Monster. B.E.A.S.T., though, is remarkably readable.

   Mark Harland, the first-person narrator, has a rather shadowy job in a rather shadowy department somewhere in MI5 or thereabouts, and as the story starts he’s ordered to infiltrate a top-secret research facility in the Defense Department and find out what the hell’s going on there.

   I should add that this infiltration is does not involve a great deal of subterfuge; simply a matter of Harland filling in for the facility’s Security Officer for a few weeks, with all documentation supplied by MI5 and a knowing wink from the Security Officer himself as regards one Synove Raynor, the facility’s resident nymphomaniac.

   This particular facility, known as RU8 has to do with genetic warfare—how to wage it, and how to see if someone’s waging it on us—and the facility’s central feature is one of those giant computers beloved of mid-1960s spy-and-sci-fi fiction, running on reel-to reel tapes and occupying several sub-basements, like the one in Alphaville (1965.)

   But while the computer is supposed to be used for genetic research (“If only we could unravel the genetic code of DNA…”) it seems the absent-minded director of the facility, an unprepossessing sort named Howard Gilley, has been using it to run an experiment in applied evolution (Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test) starting with theoretical single-cell organisms and compressing millions of years of development to produce a theoretical creature totally geared toward self-preservation.

   Or is it still theoretical?

   As Harland casually absorbs himself into the family, learns about some of the complex relationships there, and finally gets Dr. Gilley to open up a bit, he finds that the theoretical BEAST that communicates through the computer has been asking Dr. Gilley questions. And making demands.

   Nowadays we just label this Artificial Intelligence and having labeled, dismiss it. But writing fifty years ago, Maine-as-Harland does a fine job of trying to wrap his mind around the notion: If the BEAST exists, where does it reside? In the computer? In the tapes running through it? Or is it just in the mind of Dr. Gilley, who begins to seem more and more unbalanced as Harland gets deeper into the whole thing.

   I can relate to some of this. When you write fiction, something delightful happens every once in a while when one of the characters gets up and does something you weren’t expecting. So when Gilley tells Harland of his feelings when the BEAST started asking questions, I could feel for him, and I think Maine did too. But Harland has to figure out whether Gilley is going crackers or something even more sinister is coming on.

   Oddly, the elements that make those movies so dull impart a bit of gritty and gripping reality to B.E.A.S.T. as Harland deals patiently with the personalities and possibilities involved and wonders how anyone will be able to explain something as complex as this to his higher-ups… or to an MP unlikely to comprehend any concept more sophisticated than a campaign slogan. And it gets stickier still when Harland finds empty Vodka bottles and pornographic pictures hidden away in the abstemious Gilley’s office and begins to suspect their bizarre implications.

   I should add that B.E.A.S.T. proceeds to a fine spot of monster-on-the-loose that fits in perfectly with the Halloween season, and a thoughtful conclusion that will send me seeking out more of Maine’s work.

“Zamrock [Zambia-rock] was born in the ’70s in Southern Africa. Merging hard rock, psychedelia and funk, this Zambian genre was influenced by artists as diverse as Black Sabbath, James Brown and The Rolling Stones. WITCH – which stood for “We Intend To Cause Havoc” – was one of the scene’s major bands…”

Lead Vocals: Emmanuel “Jagari” Chanda
Drums: Boyd “Star MacBoyd” Sinkala
Bass Guitar: Gedeon “Giddy King” Mwamulenga
Rhythm Guitar & Vocals: John “Music” Muma
Lead Guitar & Vocals: Chris “Kims” Mbewe
Keyboard: Paul “Jones” Mumba

TERROR TRAIN. Twentieth Century Fox, 1980. Ben Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hart Bochner, David Copperfield (as The Magician). Director: Roger Spottiswoode.

   For the first forty-five minutes or so, Terror Train doesn’t disappoint. True, it’s a derivative slasher film with a plot that’s none too surprising and an urban morality tale about how it’s not always wise to play cruel pranks on people, particularly if your victim is later found out to have homicidal tendencies.

   Terror Train benefits from an above average supporting cast and from a quasi-noir claustrophobic setting in which college air partygoers in elaborate costumes ride an old train that chugs along through the wilderness on a cold, dark night. And then there’s the scream queen – Jamie Lee Curtis – who bellows out at least two absolutely memorable shrieks during the film. Because, you know, there’s a masked killer on board and he’s wearing – at least for a while – a super creepy Groucho Marx mask.

   That said, the last half-hour of the film really veers off track. After the suspenseful wind-up and the background story of who the killer might turn out to be, the film loses its focus and requires such a suspension of disbelief that makes it a lot less thrilling than it could have been. Making matters worse, by the time the whole affair ends, the train’s conductor, portrayed by Western film legend Ben Johnson, looks worn out from a long night’s work. I, for one, enjoyed the beginning of the journey but was disappointed when I arrived at the final destination.

CHARLES BARRY – The Mouls House Mystery. Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1926. E. P. Dutton, US, hardcover, 1927. McKinlay, Stone and Mackenzie, US, hardcover, as part of its “Scotland Yard Mystery Library,” no date.

   Superintendent Liddell, of the Cornwall County Police, is on holiday. Kept awake late at night by toothache, he observes through his field glasses an elderly man apparently being throttled by a younger one in the house opposite, known as Mouls House. The Superintendent and another man go to the house as quickly as they can only to find neither the attacker nor the victim. Both have disappeared.

   There is more here than meets at least Liddell’s eye. Scotland Yard is called in, in the form of Chief Detective Inspector Gilmartin (a continuing character in some of Barry’s novels), one of the Big Five, which I had always thought was Four, but I guess the number can change up or down depending on the number of biggies who happen to be around at the time.

   This is purely a police procedural, and probably a good one for its time. There are some sound deductions by Gilmartin and also a fair amount of guessing on his part, which is understandable in the light of circumstances.

   There have recently been complaints about the number of novels these days dealing with drugs, and those who are complaining probably will be surprised to learn that drug smuggling has been going on for quite some time. It has never been a money loser that I know of. But why anyone, as one of the characters in the novel does, wants to smuggle saccharine baffles me. Was it illegal in England at one time? If so, why?

Bio-Bibliographic Notes:   According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, Charles Barry was the pen name of Charles Bryson, (1887-1963) and the author of 22 works of detective fiction, 16 of them cases for Supt. Laurence Gilmartin of Scotland Yard. Some but not all were reprinted in the US.