Director – Felipe M. Guerra, Producers – Eliseu Demari, Joao Pedro Fleck, Felipe M. Guerra & Nicolas Tonsho, Cozzilla Theme – Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi & Vince Tempera. Production Company – Necro Filos Producoes Artisticas/Fantaspoa Producoes.
Luigi Cozzi
FantastiCozzi is a Documentary about Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi. Cozzi has made around eleven films in all but is not a widely known director outside of genre circles. One would have to say that most of Cozzi’s films are not the greatest with a couple of exceptions. On the other hand, what the documentary brings out is Cozzi’s absolute passion for science-fiction and horror films. In fact, he makes for such an amusing raconteur that you could so far as to say that listening to him talking about the making of his films is often more entertaining than some of the films themselves were.
The documentary was made by Brazilian director Felipe M. Guerra who has made a number of other fiction films with Patricia Gennice (1998), I Scream When I Knew What You Did in Friday the 13th of Last Summer (2001) and Cannibals and Loneliness (2006). In addition, Guerra has made episodes of the anthologies The Curse of Sanguanel (2014) and 13 Weird Stories (2015), as well as one further documentary about an Italian horror director with Deodato Holocaust (2019).
Through various interviews in both Italian and English, Cozzi tells his story – of how he was inspired after seeing Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) as a child and became obsessed with becoming a filmmaker. He started translating English SF stories and writing original works of fiction. He became the Italian correspondent to Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-82) just at the time when the Italian horror industry of that period was exploding. He made his directorial debut with Tunnel Under the World (1969), a fascinatingly obscure film shot for the smell of a used shoestring, and we get to see some of Cozzi’s highly experimental footage from the film.
Cozzi became one of the first people to interview Dario Argento just after Argento made The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). The two became good friends and Argento took Cozzi on as an assistant, before Argento suggested they co-write Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). Cozzi went on to direct The Neighbour (1973), an episode of Argento’s short-lived anthology tv series Door Into Darkness, which he later expanded into the full-length giallo The Killer Must Kill (1975), Cozzi has worked as an assistant director for Argento numerous times since. Indeed, Cozzi himself introduces the film from Profondo Rosso, the memorabilia shop and Argento museum that he manages in Rome.
Cozzi takes us through working as a film distributor in the late 1970s, releasing a number of SF films, including a version of Godzilla (1954) for which he colourised the print and added his own stop-motion animated effects. Surprisingly, the film that Cozzi describes as his best is his least known – the romantic film Dedicated to a Star/Take All of Me (1976), which he says is the one on which he had the greatest freedom and creative control.
Cozzi’s best and best known film is Starcrash (1978). He tells of conceiving an SF epic and going to the extent of shooting an effects reel, which nobody seemed interested in until Star Wars (1977) went massive and he was offered money. He talks of shooting effects on a budget where the producers were expecting another Star Wars; of possible attraction between Caroline Munro and David Hasselhoff on set, resulting in jealousy from her husband Judd Hamilton who sought to prevent a kissing scene from taking place. At one point, Guerra does a split-screen cut where he places scenes from Starcrash alongside ones from films like Forbidden Planet (1956), Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to show Cozzi’s influence, and similar cuts where he compares scenes showing the direct influence of Star Wars.
Cozzi’s other best known film is the Cannon Films production Hercules (1983). We hear a number of anecdotes – how the film was Lou Ferrigno’s idea because he was a fan of the Steve Reeves Hercules (1958); how Cozzi had wanted to cast Caroline Munro again but this was nixed by Golan and Globus who hated Judd Hamilton; how the mythological creatures were replaced by robots because these were easier to stop-motion animate, requiring only jerky limited movements.
Even more amusing is the story of how the sequel The Adventures of Hercules (1985) came to be. Lou Ferrigno had signed on to make The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1985) but the finished results were near unwatchable. Cozzi was hired to come in and shoot more material and Ferrigno brought back before Golan and Globus decided to turn two weeks of reshoots into four and make another film. However, Ferrigno’s asking price for a Hercules film was more so the entire film was made without telling him Ferrigno it was a Hercules film. The reason for the animated figures is that Ferrigno’s time on set had run out so Cozzi rotoscoped some animated scenes of him fighting from Hercules. Surprisingly, the film does not cover Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1990), another Ferrigno Italian fantasy that Cozzi did uncredited reshoots for.
Paganini Horror (1989) is quickly skipped over. Cozzi talks of shooting second unit on the troubled Nosferatu in Venice (1988), where he was assigned to deal with Klaus Kinski who insisted only on being shot at dawn as he believed that the light then was the most beautiful, ending in Cozzi shooting endless scenes of Kinski walking about. The Black Cat (1990) came about when Argento suggested that Cozzi complete his Three Mothers trilogy but Cozzi did not feel that he could do it justice and created a meta-fiction. Cozzi recounts the bizarre experience of working on Argento’s The Black Cat segment of Two Evil Eyes (1990) only to have the producers rename his film as The Black Cat in the midst. The documentary wraps up with some brief scenes of Cozzi’s then most recent film Blood on Melies Moon (2016).
Trailer here