I myself was lucky enough to pick it up sight-unseen at the recommendation of the clerk at the local cult-movie video store back at Yale (before the University moved a Blockbuster in down the street and put the place out of business). I took it home, stuck it in the common-room VCR, and sat enthralled with half my roommates as this movie, utterly unlike anything I'd ever seen before, played out. "Wow," said my pre-med housemate upon its conclusion, "what a movie--that had something for everybody!" And indeed it does. The film's sense of humor shines through even in its bleakest and grossest moments, and is as deadpan as it wanna be: Says a doctor at one point to Della'morte, who for reasons I'll avoid getting into is seeking a fairly radical bit of sex therapy, "Please don't make me cut it off. Today, I'm... just not up for it." There's broad but vicious satire of contemporary mores, both political ("Vote For A Man Who Has Lost All Other Happiness" is proposed as an hysterically exploitative campaign slogan by the town's mayor, whose daughter has just been decapitated in a motorcycle accident) and sexual ("Mind your business," yells a love-struck young woman when Della'morte interrupts her post-mortem reunion with her dead boyfriend, "I can be eaten by whomever I please."). The performances are note-perfect all around, and Everett and Falchi imbue their roles with a kind of nihilistic glamour, like a grand guignol Belmondo and Seberg. Moreover, the two leads are genuinely glorious specimens of humanity; you see quite a bit of them, and they give their sex scenes a genuine paraphiliac chemistry. Indeed, the whole movie is like paraphilia in film form--instead of channelling sexual energy into fetishes, the movie channels horror into comedy, comedy into erotica, erotica into romance, romance into slapstick, slapstick into tragedy, tragedy into gore, gore into high art, high art into pulp, pulp into philosophy. It bridges the gap between film grad students, comic-book geeks and horny teenagers by referencing cult favorites both silly (The Three Stooges) , sinister (the whole zombie-flick pantheon), and sublime (Magritte). And the ending--nope, not another word out of me, just that it's metaphor writ large, and it's genuinely fascinating to see.

Oh, and did I mention the zombie Boy Scouts? Damn, this is a good movie.