Tutti defunti... tranne i morti

I had first watched this some years ago and recall being underwhelmed by it – but, then, that viewing had been accompanied by Avati's much more somber and altogether superior efforts THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (1976) and ZEDER (1983)...

A bizarre but heavy-handed giallo spoof whose overall effect is extremely uneven, it features a plethora of eccentric characters: inept detective, diminutive hero, a cross-eyed psycho and a dwarf (actually a man in drag!) for servants – plus a mad combo of relatives including a matriarch suffering from dementia, her cowboy of a second husband, her sex-crazed retard son who has to be frequently restrained via electro-shock therapy, another son who's also a 'little man' (played by Bob Tonelli, one of the film's own financiers!), etc. Both the hero and the detective overstate their masculinity – the former swaggers incessantly, while the latter is frequently caught with his pants down; the lovely and lively heroine is played by Francesca Marciano (whose character in THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS was given a particularly gruesome death, a scene which had even adorned that film's memorable poster!).

The film does provide some belly laughs – such as the casual knifing of a book vendor early on, the death of a relative by a booby-trap hair-dryer, his wife's demise via a dynamite placed in her mouth, the detective biting Tonelli's hand to check if it's fake (with the latter snapping "F*** You!" at the former's suggestion to try the other one), and the American jumping on his horse from a high window (with the animal ending up half-buried in the ground and the rider with a tremendous pain in the groin!). There's also an ingenious resolution (with the initials of all the victims comprising an anagram of the location of the family treasure's hiding-place) – even though the identity of the killer is rather given away by the film's very title!

The Raro DVD edition I watched includes an interesting featurette – lasting a little over half-an-hour – involving the Avati brothers (co-writer/director Pupi and co-writer/producer Antonio), star Gianni Cavina (the detective) and character actor/TV personality Michele Mirabella (the cowboy) in which they discuss the genesis of the film and its production, as well as their relationship to one another and the rest of the cast.

Ultimately, I liked the movie well enough this time around to want to check out two other Avati comedies I recently taped off late-night Italian TV – LA MAZURKA DEL BARONE, DELLA SANTA E DEL FICO FIORONE (1975) and BORDELLA (1975)...

Me and Italian comedy don't get along. Me and Pupi Avati don't get along either (I'm one of the few who found The House with Laughing Windows incredibly dull). So guess what... I really didn't like Tutti defunti... tranne i morti, a weak spoof of the giallo and old dark house genres which I found about as funny as being attacked by a razor-wielding psycho wearing a black fedora and cape.

Carlo Delle Piane plays bookseller Dante, who goes to the mansion of the Zanotti family to try and interest them in a book which mentions their ancestors; while he is there, a maniac in regulation giallo attire begins to bump off the eccentric family members (who have gathered for the funeral of the marquis, Ignazio) in an effort to fulfil the prophecy within the book and consequently reveal the whereabouts of a hidden treasure.

With the genre ripe for parody, this film could have been hilarious, but the broad comedy is too imbecilic to work, Avati and his cast resorting to bad slapstick that is more irritating than funny. The 'comedic' scenes include the death of a simpleton by electrocution (his anti-masturbation device plugged into a high voltage power supply), murder by hairdryer, a very stupid game of Russian roulette, the discovery of a midget in a fridge, and another dead midget in a parcel. But the worst moments come courtesy of Gianni Cavina as private detective Martini, whose dreadful Inspector Clouseau-style buffoonery is simply embarrassing.

2/10 for gorgeous Francesca Marciano as Ilaria, who for some reason finds Dante and his strange nose irresistible, and for Greta Vayan as sexy nurse Hilde, who has just as bad taste in men as Ilaria.

It's incredibly difficult to make a solid and compelling whodunit slasher/Giallo with imaginative kills and an unexpected climax. It's even more difficult to make a spoof of the slasher/Giallo genre that is both genuinely funny and intriguing. That means it's practically impossible to accomplish a successful combo of both, and you'd have to be a real genius director to do so.

Is Pupi Avati a genius director? Well, almost... He did make one of the greatest Gialli in history, with "The House with Laughing Windows", so if anyone could pull it off, it would be him. Avati's attempt at spoofing the genre with "All Deceased Except the Dead" perfectly fits the clichéd description of hit and miss. There are many great aspects, most notably the mystery plot and the guessing for the killer's identity, and admittedly also a surprisingly large number of gags and dumb situations are fun. Unfortunately, though, entire parts of the script that are clearly meant to be comical are painfully un-funny and downright embarrassing, and the film is at least twenty minutes overlong.

All the great and necessary ingredients are there. An old dark mansion, filled to the rooftop with eccentric and perverted members of a family that are gruesomely offed one by one, by an oddly squeaking killer entirely dressed in black. To turn all this into a comedy, just throw in a completely incompetent private detective, a clumsy anti-hero, and a few outcast characters like a dwarf and a cross-eyed butler. There are plenty of murders, and some of them are fantastic (like the booby-trapped hairdryer), and even the denouement holds a clever twist in store. So, in short, if Avati had thrown most of the slapstick overboard and purely focused on the whodunit plot, it would have been his second Giallo-classic in a row.

The comic/suspense plot is based off of Agatha Christie's timeless "And Then There Were None." While the plot is a murder mystery, the tone is a comedy. Some of the comic elements still work... not in a laugh out loud way but in a smile at how silly it is way.

Carlo Delle Piane was likable as the Pink Panther look-alike. He gets most of the better comic moments.

I found myself hating Gianni Cavina's character who was just too over-the-top even for an absurd slapstick comedy. Maybe this type of humor just didn't age well. Maybe it was never funny. I don't know.

Oddly, the murder mystery piece is the strongest component of the film... much stronger than the comedy. The cast all appeared to be having fun making the movie. At the end of the day, this is actually one of Pupi Avati's more entertaining films... just don't take it too seriously.

I really liked "La casa dalle finestre che ridono", excellent horror full of disturbing suggestions, but I prefer a bit "Tutti defunti tranne i morti". This film is a comic (and grotesque) version of "La casa dalle finestre che ridono", full of atmosphere and mystery but also exhilarating. Most of the funniness comes from the accents and the expressions of the characters, so if you're not Italian probably you won't enjoy it like me. It's a beautiful horror story (as good as the story of "La casa dalle finestre che ridono") with characters grotesque and surreal. At the beginning of the film one could be disappointed by all these strange people, but slowly the story becomes more intriguing and mysterious, and it becomes a wonderful mix of horror and funniness, mystery and irony..