Just when you think you're suffering from zombie fatigue, another project comes along to get you excited again. If you thought The Walking Dead might be the last word on the genre, think on. Fangoria has a scoop that Michele Soavi is working on a sequel to Dellamorte Dellamore, his bonkers Italian comedy horror first released in 1994.
Based on a novel by Dylan Dog creator Tiziano Sclavi, Dellamorte Dellamore stars Rupert Everett as cemetery caretaker Francesco, trying to stay on top of his paperwork while keeping the frequently rising undead from overrunning his town; obsessively pursuing a succession of women, all played by Anna Falci, who resemble his lost love (whom he shot, twice, once by mistake and once as a zombie); and fending off job offers from the Grim Reaper.
It did poorly on release, but has built up a cult following over time and has a high-profile fan in Martin Scorsese. Soavi's fellow Italian genre director Luigi Cozzi likes it too. He calls the film "A Gothic masterpiece", and recently informed Fango that "Michele tells me he has started writing the script for a sequel. He wants it to be a great, strong, shocking Italian horror movie: a special project."
Soavi disappeared from cinema screens for a while after Dellamorte, directing for TV for a number of years, Recently he's returned with crime thriller The Goodbye Kiss and historical The Blood of the Losers though, and he seems to be planning on keeping busy...
"Michele also told me," says Cozzi, "that he's going to shoot a movie in the style of The Goonies, starring Nicolas Cage, about some boys' adventures in Pompeii while searching for hidden treasure." Cage will be taking the Anne Ramsey role.*
No further details yet, such as what the Cage movie actually is, or whether Rupert Everett is likely to return for Dellamorte 2, but the prospects of further Everett zombie control and Cage tearing up the screen in Pompeii certainly have us interested. Cozzi says that Pompeii Cage shoots sometime this year, and the Dellamorte sequel either in late 2011 or early 2012. Watch this space.
*Not really. As far as we know. And we don't really know anything so it's actually entirely possible.