Director/Screenplay – Luigi Cozzi, Story – Luigi Cozzi, Alexandra Jousse & Giulio Leone, Producer – Maria Letizia Sercia, Photography – Frank Guerin, Francesca Paolucci & Andrea Pieroni, Music – Simone Martino, Visual Effects – Jean-Manuel Costa & Vittorio Viscardi, Animation – Andrea Pieroni. Production Company – Profondo Rosso.
Cast
Luigi Cozzi (Himself), Philippe Beun-Garbe (Pierpoljakos), Alessia Patregnani, Sharon Alessandri, Brahim Amadouche’ (Gormak), Federico Cerini, Riccardo Leoni, Barbara Magnolfi, Alessandra Maravia Maria Cristina Mastrangeli, Chiara Pavoni, Luigi Schettini, David “Zed” Traylor (Georges Melies)
With – Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Giuseppe Cordivani, Sebastiano Fusco, Fabio Giovannini, Manilo Gomarasca, Luigi Pastore, Mina Presicci, Angela Sercia, Maria Letizia Sercia, Jacques Sirgent, Antonio Tentori, Paolo Zelati
Plot
A mystery woman enters Profondo Rosso, the memorabilia shop that film director Luigi Cozzi runs in Rome. In the basement, the statue of the killer from Blood and Black Lace comes to life and stabs her. Among her things, Cozzi finds a copy of the French science-fiction novel L’Universe Vagabond. He then has visions prompting him to seek the book’s hidden meaning. This sets him on a strange journey involving parallel worlds, leading back to alchemical secrets opened up by cinematic pioneers Louis Le Prince and Georges Melies. All the while, the figure of the killer come to life stalks the people aiding Cozzi’s investigation.
Luigi Cozzi is a regular director of Italian genre films. Cozzi first made the low-budget SF film Tunnel Under the World (1968). He started in the industry proper as an assistant director to Dario Argento, co-writing Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). He also directed the gialloThe Killer Must Kill Again (1975); the modest hit of the space opera Starcrash (1978); Alien Contamination (1980); Cannon Film’s Hercules (1983) and The Adventures of Hercules (1985) starring Lou Ferrigno; the gialloPaganini Horror (1989); and The Black Cat (1990), as well as several documentaries about Argento. FantastiCozzi (2016) is also a fascinating a documentary about Cozzi’s life and career.
Blood on Melies’ Moon features Cozzi’s return to filmmaking after a 26-year absence. It is a very different film than any he has made before – it is shot digitally rather than on film, for one. Moreover, Cozzi appears to have filmed cheaply winding in himself as the lead character, along with assorted people around him, including his wife(?)/girlfriend(?), fellow director Lamberto Bava and a very brief appearance from Argento, while shooting much of the film at Profondo Rosso, the Argento memorabilia store in Rome that Cozzi manages.
Quite what Blood on Melies’ Moon is about is a complete scratch of the head. Try following the disparate ideas floating around. A mystery woman enters the basement at Profondo Rosso where a mannequin of the killer in a diorama recreating Mario Bava’s seminal gialloBlood and Black Lace (1964) comes to life and stabs her. The mannequin reappears throughout the story and kills assorted others who aid Cozzi. In the woman’s things, Cozzi finds a copy of a French-language SF novel and is prompted to seek deeper meanings in it – where his investigations are aided at times by séances. There is something to do with parallel worlds, although quite what I couldn’t tell you – it just involves Cozzi staring into a mirror, several cosmic CGI shots and he debating about his mirror reflection. At one point, Cozzi even turns up in his own apartment in an orange furry suit – why, who knows, he just found and put it on is the only explanation we get.
Director Luigi Cozzi investigates in the basement of Profondo Rosso
As much as one can work out what Blood on Melies’ Moon is about it appears to be Cozzi’s muddled tribute to cinema, regarding it as some alchemical medium. Somehow the mystery SF book is tied to alchemical secrets of manipulating light and these lead back to how such magics were harnessed by early film pioneers Louis Le Prince, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the Lumiere Brothers and Georges Melies, who both coincidentally had offices at the Theatre de Robert Houdin in Paris.
In the latter sections, the book magically transforms into a facsimile of the rocket capsule from A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Cozzi takes a tour through the Melies universe, which is also populated by assorted ships from classic SF movies (some cheap but not too bad CGI effects). The plotting throughout is completely haphazard. It is a mishmash of ideas without any connecting rhyme or reason to them. Even the mystery SF book that acts as a McGuffin of sorts peters out and there is no real dramatic resolution reached.
Certainly, there are times when Cozzi is not taking himself too seriously. We get a mock-up parody of Bride of the Monster 2 starring ‘Pas-Tor Johnson’, in response to internet critics labelling Cozzi as ‘the Italian Edward D. Wood Jr’ or ‘the pasta Edward Wood’, while Cozzi wakes up from the dream crying “I am not the Italian Edward Wood.” He then consoles himself that at least Tim Burton might come to Rome to make a film about him a la Ed Wood (1994) and that he could play himself. As the credits play out, we meet Cozzi in an alternate timeline where he is wearing dreadlocks (a bad wig) and gives a rendition of a rock song called Los Figatos.
