a.k.a. Godzilla / Godzilla il re dei mostri
company: Cozzilla S.R.L.
year: 1977
runtime: 88′ / 106′
country: Italy
director: Luigi Cozzi
cast: Raymond Burr, Takeshi Shimura,
Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi,
Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata
special effects: Armando Valcauda
Not on home video
The year nineteen seventy seven is all but immortal in the eyes of this site’s curator – it will be forever remembered as the year when dinosaurs rose to attack vacationers around Mt. Fuji, school girls were devoured by home accents, and the world was introduced for the first (though, sadly, not the last) time to the bloated mythology of STAR WARS. Indeed, in this viewers mind, there is no year more important to the history of bizarre film than those absurdly bountiful 365 days.
But when shuffling through 1977′s mountainous shrine of the strange, one title alone rises above the rest as a near-forgotten testament to just how weird the film world can get. I speak not of the ridiculous LEGEND OF THE DINOSAURS AND MONSTER BIRDS, the surreal HOUSE, or the derivatively entertaining STAR WARS, but of the Japanese cum American cum Italian (twice!) epic best known as COZZILLA.
Sadly enough, COZZILLA isn’t actually the title of the film in question – it was advertised exclusively as GODZILLA, the same title that appears at its beginning, while the intermission cards indicate a title of GODZILLA IL RE DEI MOSTRI (a direct translation of the American release 
title for GOJIRA, GODZILLA KING OF THE MONSTERS). COZZILLA, as a title, seems to be derived from two separate sources, the first of which is the notation of the production company responsible for the film itself – COZZILLA s.r.l. Secondly, the word is purportedly a nickname of sorts for the director, though I can find no real corroborating evidence of this.
All semantics aside, COZZILLA has come to be the preferred title for the project the world over – Steve Ryfle referenced it as such in his book JAPAN’S FAVORITE MON-STAR and even director Luigi Cozzi is known to refer to it in that way. Regardless of what you call it, COZZILLA is one weird cookie . . .
It’s difficult to say when and where COZZILLA began – it is definite, however, that the then up-and-coming Dario Argento understudy Luigi Cozzi was extremely instrumental in its inception. The 1960′s and 1970′s saw a revival of popular older films occurring worldwide – with that as his background, Cozzi set out to revive one of his all-time favorites in a way so outlandish that it seems to have never been attempted since.
GOJIRA was popular and well received when released domestically in Japan in 1954 – but it wasn’t until Joseph Levine purchased the international release rights to the film that GOJIRA became a staggering success. Levine left Terry Morse with the job of renovating GOJIRA in order to make it more appealing to its presumed target audience – young Westerners. An entirely new framework was constructed for the film and Raymond Burr was cast in the lead as reporter Steve Martin; the rest of the original Japanese footage was then dubbed and edited into compliance with the new flashback storyline. The result was GODZILLA KING OF THE MONSTERS!, something of a smash hit when it made its way to US theaters in 1956.
Transworld and Embassy Pictures took to releasing the profitable monster opus – a shadow of the brooding Japanese original – around the world in a variety of dubbed languages. Paramount pictures oversaw the Italian leg of the distribution, and 10 year old Luigi Cozzi was introduced to his favorite radiation-spewing behemoth for the first time. Thusly the wheels were set in motion . . .
In retrospect, Cozzi’s approach to reviving GODZILLA was equally more and less audacious than that which had been done to it already. For starters, the original story arch (though, admittedly, the one put in place first by the American distributors) was left almost entirely intact, save for a couple of narrative additions. That’s not to say that his version would go unedited, however. On the contrary, Cozzi’s GODZILLA would feature a veritable mountain of archival footage culled from everything from news reels to other feature films. What’s more, Cozzi’s version would be both visually and phonically tweaked – with the film being remixed for a Sensurround treatment and the images themselves colorized.
But perhaps colorized is not the appropriate term for it in this post-Turner age when colorization has been turned into something of a digital art. Cozzi tasked long-time special effects collaborator Armando Valcauda, best known for his stop motion animation in 1979′s STAR CRASH, with turning the black and white film into something the more discriminating audiences of the mid 1970′s could better gestate. The end result was a technique every bit as crude as it was impressive – SPECTRORAMA 70**. Colored gels were applied to the newly edited footage by Valcauda and a new negative struck from 
the final product – the end result was the nearly hypnotic effect of seeing a non-color film suddenly accompanied with garish and shape-shifting blobs of reds, blues, purples, and greens.
It’s something of a pity that COZZILLA came along when it did – had it been produced for release around the same time as 2001 it could surely have usurped its advertised status as “The Ultimate Trip” . . .
COZZILLA begins in a way that will seem utterly unfamiliar to those accustomed to either the American or original Japanese versions of the film – with that mountain of archival footage at his beck and call, Cozzi whisks his audience back to Hiroshima on the day of August 6, 1945. We see the Enola Gay on its approach and the citizens of the city going about their every day business – then, the flash. The screen turns a bloody red as the mushroom cloud billows up over the city. Buildings are reduced to fiery rubble, cars and trees to skeletons, and people to surreal carbonized shapes reminiscent of those discovered in the remains of Pompeii. All the while, a bizarrely appropriate synthesized score plays on in the background. The scene fades into the smoky opening credits from a fly over of the decimated remnants of a war-torn city.
The Hiroshima prologue is one of the most effective moments to be found in COZZILLA – with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer, Cozzi effectively and disturbingly evokes the aftermath of civilization’s first coming face to face with the terrifying power of the atom. It’s a pity, then, that this high point should segue so directly into the obtuse opening credits. Cozzi saw fit to credit everyone associated with the film over the years, from the Japanese to the Americans to the Italians – while a wonderful gesture, this leaves the opening credits an agonizing four minutes in which the entire film seems to stand still.
The credits dispensed with, we learn that it’s August 6, 1954 – the familiar pan shot over the smoldering remains of Tokyo is lent a disturbing edge through this direct connection to the atomic bombing just 
9 years before. From here on out the film plays in largely the same manner as GODZILLA KING OF THE MONSTERS!, save for a multitude of occasionally subtle (and often not) changes.
Having been rescued from the ruins, reporter Martin (the Italian dubbed Raymond Burr) recounts his strange story – a number of ships disappear in violent and bizarre accidents, leading to an official investigation and the discovery of the horrible truth. Torn from its undersea niche by the testing of hydrogen bombs is the towering behemoth, Godzilla. First sated with tormenting the small populace of Oto island, the monster soon turns his sights to mainland Japan. While the story is entirely familiar the visuals are anything but. Each of the special effects sequences, save for the sinking of the first ship, is augmented with a variety of archival footage. Most notable in this early third of COZZILLA is the extended storm sequence, which includes new footage of flooding, blowing trees, and outright destruction (as well as at least one embarrassingly cartoony bolt of lightning).
Things take a more noticeable turn for the weird when Godzilla makes his first attack on the outskirts of Tokyo. It is here that the Spectrorama 70 technique is first used to its fullest, lending increased dramatic weight to the visuals through the use of deep reds and blues. Godzilla’s attack on the passenger train here becomes an all-out assault on an apparent fleet of locomotives through the incorporation of large chunks of film footage from, of all places, the John Frankenheimer World War II thriller THE TRAIN [1964]. It is here, in this absurdly edited amalgamation of cinema, that the audience first becomes aware of COZZILLA‘s biggest fault – its audio editing. Obviously having none of the original elements to work with, Cozzi and co. took to extending the audio into the new scenes the only way they could – by cutting the track, looping it repeatedly, and implanting new sound effects when necessary. While the idea doesn’t sound necessarily bad on paper, the results leave quite a lot to be desired.
In the end, Godzilla retreats back into the sea, Dr. Yamane warns that he will return, and his reverberated words segue into the intermission. It is when the second half begins that COZZILLA really kicks into high gear . . .
After the initial onslaught by Godzilla, the Japan Self Defense Force is called into action, evacuating as many people as it can from doomed Tokyo and preparing for the monster’s inevitable return – little does the audience know that they, too, should be preparing themselves for the unseen horrors ahead. Once more the beast rises from Tokyo Bay, this time lured into a highly electrified barbed wire fence stretching the entire distance around the bay – when the leaver is pushed, high voltage electricity pumped through the lines, and the artillery shelling begun, COZZILLA goes into overdrive.
Armando Valcauda’s colorization turns frenetic, with the primary hues of the earlier half of the film now replaced with surreal pinks and yellows and reds, often alternated at such speed as to be literally seizure inducing. Film footage is re-framed and slowed to half its original speed for no apparent reason as Godzilla blasts his fiery atomic breath across the Tokyo landscape, causing people all-to-real to burst helplessly into flame. Augmented with footage of very real places burning during the Allied-led fire raids and the Nazi blitz, Godzilla’s final attack on Tokyo becomes less an allegory for the total destruction on display during the last world war than a literal depiction of it. Footage from other films creeps into the mix as well, with GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN, KRONOS, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, and THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE all serving as sources for 
new material. This sequence, nearly doubled in length from either the Japanese or American cuts of the film, takes on an intense air of unreality as the cavalcade of sounds and images plays out before our senses.
The experience is, for lack of better words, insane – whether accidental or intentional, the confounding combination of the imagery, color, and sound evokes a surreal apocalypse, a tangled nightmare of fantasy and reality in which real people explode into flames in the path of a lumbering man in a suit. It becomes obvious, here, why COZZILLA was advertised as “The greatest apocalypse in the history of cinema.”
After Godzilla returns to the sea the sun rises over the destruction – real corpses wash ashore or smolder amongst the ruins while those who have survived attempt to piece their world back together. This entire post-attack sequence is comprised of newsreel footage alternated with slowed shots of Godzilla, tinted a bloody red, firing his death ray. The only sounds are of the girls’ choir singing their prayer for peace (taken from a later event in the film) and wind whipping about the ruins. This is easily the most effective scene in COZZILLA and, though hardly subtle, hammers home the anti-war message originally lost in the translation of the film for Western audiences. Harsh, crude, and undeniably disturbing, Cozzi’s aftermath sequence will likely offend some audience members and provide sick laughs for those jaded enough to find the imagery evoked old and antiquated. For me it’s come to stand as one of cinema’s strangest and more honest depictions of the human cost of war.
From here, things play out as normal until the conclusion of the film, in which COZZILLA falters again. Ogata (Akira Takarada) and Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) descend into the abyss, oxygen destroyer in tow, in search of Godzilla. They are waylaid, however, by the sudden appearance of the shark vs. octopus battle from THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS – this sequence is pathetic enough in its original context and serves no good purpose in COZZILLA either. Once Godzilla is located the oxygen destroyer is deployed. Ogata surfaces while Serizawa stays behind, and a fleet of battleships opens fire on the monster as it rises from the depths in its death throws. This is another colossal misstep, in opinion – combined with the slow-down and repetition of the footage, it only serves to extend Godzilla’s death scene far beyond its welcome while simultaneously removing much of the quiet emotional impact the sequence once held.
It is shortly after this, as Godzilla dissolves, that the only available print of COZZILLA abruptly ends. The source itself seems to be a low-rent video telecine from the original theatrical print, edited to roughly fit a 90 minute time slot.* The overall image quality is akin to that of an 
in-theater camcorder copy of any theatrical release. To make matters worse, the source copy appears to have been recorded from a UHF broadcast of Luigi Cozzi’s FANTASCIENZA television program, complete with frequent dropouts and loads of video interference – not exactly the ideal way to screen a film.
The very quality of this source, sent from Italy to America via the low-grade glory of nth generation VHS dubs, has thrown the original nature of the film into question for some, with suspicions rising about whether or not it was entirely devised for use on Cozzi’s TV show. Unbelievable as it may seem, COZZILLA was theatrically released in Italy in 1977, a fact substantiated by a mass of advertising materials including lobby cards, one sheets, and insert posters. The only person I have found who saw the film during its run is Max Della Mora (who, coincidentally, found me after I incorrectly identified him as Max Della Rosa in my original review for this film) – according to him the Sensurround effect, which caused theatre seats to vibrate (ala EARTHQUAKE), as well as the bizarre colorization were both fascinating and impressive at the time. After its brief theatrical run COZZILLA sank quickly into obscurity, notable only for the changes made to it and awakened only rarely for the infrequent public access TV run. According to Cozzi, an Italian video company presently owns the negative for COZZILLA, having intended to release it to DVD to tie-in with their release of the original film – sadly, this never came to pass and COZZILLA remains one of the more elusive cinematic oddities.
It’s difficult for me to know where I stand on this film as a whole, though my opinion of it has grown over the years since I first saw it thanks to an almost unhealthy obsession I have with it. On a technical level it alternates between brilliant and bumbling on a relatively regular basis and it owes nearly all of its thematic weight to the versions of the film released before it. As Della Mora has stated previously, the film is “a freak, an oddity” with little of value other than the extensive changes made to it. Still, I can’t seem to get it out of my head . . .
I can’t bring myself to recommend COZZILLA, but neither can I bring myself to decry it – it is, after all, the textbook example of a “what the fuck!?” film (if ever there was one) and this site owes its very inception a considerable debt to it. Comparable only, perhaps, to the colossal misfire ALL OF THIS AND WORLD WAR II (an ungodly amalgamation of WWII footage and Beatles tunes), COZZILLA is undeniably strange by any estimation. My best advice is to proceed with caution, as your mileage will most definitely vary.
* The 89 minute running time is quoted from my PAL sourced VHS of this film – all of the available prints of the film have this same running time. Outside sources have indicated that the film’s original running time was around 106 minutes (roughly 12 minutes longer than available versions after the PAL framerate conversion is taken into account). This is further corroborated by Luigi Cozzi himself, who told me that the film, when shown theatrically, had a running time of almost 2 hours. I suspect those trimmed 12 minutes account for the majority of scenes missing from the my TV-sourced review print.
** This is really just nit-picking, but several sources (including the aforementioned Steve Ryfle book) have noted that the Spectrorama 70 colorization technique was never used after COZZILLA – this is incorrect. The technique was utilized again by Armando Valcauda on at least one later occasion – to colorize footage culled from George Pal’s ATLANTIS THE LOST CONTINENT for Luigi Cozzi’s 1983 effort HERCULES. That brief segment appears during the explosive conclusion of the film.
