The cinema between the 50s and the 70s was a factory of dreams, but above all, of blatant copies, nameless plagiarisms, and things that today would make us put our hands to our heads. The reason was the industrialization of countries other than the US, with its eternal and luminous Hollywood, but also the decline of the once omnipotent movie mecca: although it seems that Hollywood has never ceased to be relevant, in reality, since the 50s it is no longer what it was. And that is why the copy, more or less blatant, of what came from there or from anywhere else became the norm. Who was going to complain?
Even more so if the one you are copying is a Japanese studio. Or that’s what the Italian director Luigi Cozilli must have thought when he released his own version of Godzilla in 1977, known as Codzzilla. A modified and colored version of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the American version of the original Godzilla from 1954. But many things went wrong, leading to the legend that this movie is today.
A director like they don’t make anymore
Luigi Cozzi is an Italian director, screenwriter, and writer known for how his films become progressively stranger as the plot unfolds. Still active today, his first film was Il tunnel sotto il mondo, a low-budget gem adapting the novel of the same name by Frederik Pohl, released in 1969 when he was only 21 years old, with his latest film to date being the hallucinatory Little Wizards of Oz, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz set in Rome released in 2018. His most well-known film is Hercules, a true delirium released by Cannon in 1983, where he would battle King Minos, who attempts to take over the world thanks to the most terrible power of all: science. A film that was a modest success, thanks to the lead role of bodybuilder-turned-actor Lou Ferrigno, who would have an even more insane sequel two years later.
Before the fantasy that was Hercules and its sequel, Le avventure dell’incredibile Ercole, Cozzi worked on some projects that caught the attention of the public or the products. Or that would end up drawing attention, years later, due to the interesting decisions that were made when approaching them. Because with the release of the 1976 remake of King Kong by John Guillermin, Cozzi had an idea: he could make a remake of a giant monster movie and take advantage of the success of King Kong. And he got to work.
His first idea was to resurrect Gorgo, the 1961 film by Eugène Lourié. The problem was that the rights to acquire the film were too high, something that made Cozzi lose interest in it. His second best option was a monster today, and probably then too, much more well-known: Godzilla. Negotiating with Toho, he could only acquire the black and white negatives of the American version from 1956, although he wanted the original Japanese version. The problem was that distributors did not want to show a black and white film. And that’s where the headaches began.
A Japanese Monster in Italy
Cozzi found that negotiating with the Japanese, and with Toho it is no exception, is never easy. To color the negatives, he had to negotiate new clauses, but he also had to get the final approval from the studio for the use of music and new stock footage. As movies at that time had to be at least 90 minutes long, he had to add new footage, and since shooting something new would cost him more money than he wanted to invest, he had a less than brilliant idea: to add images of real wars and massacres. A very common occurrence a few years earlier, especially in Mondo films by people like Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara, and Franco Prosperi, but it was still in extremely poor taste and already very controversial for the time.
In this way, it reached the 90 minutes of footage, but in a more than questionable manner. Coloring it in its own way, adding images of dead civilians and soldiers that have nothing to do with the film in places that have little to do with it, and with a soundtrack by Vince Tempera that adds a peculiar synthesizer sound to the whole, the result was a 106-minute film made in less than three months, hastily put together, which resulted in a notable box office failure.
Certainly, they were other times
Despite the fact that Toho currently holds the rights to the colored version of Godzilla, they have never made any effort to recover or acknowledge it in any way. Whenever they hold any kind of retrospective on the character and his filmography, they conveniently ignore the Italian version from 1977, acting as if Cozzilla never existed. Whether it is due to its poor quality, because it does not add anything substantial compared to the two original films, or because of the questionable taste in using real images of extreme violence to create cinematic effects in the movie.
In any case, Cozilla exists and is not difficult to find for those who are curious to see it. It is a curiosity from another time, today impossible, or at least impossible legally: Toho would not willingly give up the footage of its films for something like this under any circumstances. And that makes Cozilla interesting. It teaches us what cinema was like in another era, when everything was still possible with effort and enough interest to make it happen. Something that also has its charm.