Luigi Cozzi making GODZILLA (1977): nobody ever gonna forget the name of Luigi Cozzi. oh! I'm gonna make a movie about it
well, you're not wrong pal, people *are* going to remember this work you're about to excrete onto the market
Steve Martin: βItβs these cans! He hates these cans!β
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
and sometimes the gel effects just straight up work
anyway, time for an extended sequence of real wartime sub-hunting footage cut together
Watching an Italian Guy's idea of an American Guy watching the events of GOJIRA (1954) and also some snuff footage, the GODZILLA (1977) experience
the horror of the fish getting all oxygen destroyed kinda hits different after the dickhead director has shown you footage of actual wartime corpses
trampling all over the original film's art of leaving the worst of the horror *implied*, inviting the viewer to reflect on that horror and draw comparisons for themselves
fuck you Cozzi
GOJIRA (1954) is such a moving film that even this cough-syrup recut is not able to suppress the chilling power it contains
@SnoopJ It's the magazine publishing building. They get at least 30 stories out a month. #monsterdon #wrongfrogs #humorismypassion
"he's as tall as a 30-story building"
[cuts to footage of Godzilla next to power lines for a very well-deifned scale reference]
film-making!
the military march part of a Godzilla movie is a hard thing to resist enjoying
it's just such a good theme
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@combatwombat Looks like it was just slop-tinted so they could pass it off as a "color" film
Luigi Cozzi made his Godzilla version under the COZZILLA s.r.l. production company. Heh.
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature
Perry Mason vs Godzilla
Still a nice shot (in motion, where you can see him more clearly). #monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
distributors apparently would not touch a movie that was any shorter than 90 minutes, so Cozzi had to pad the runtime of the American cut of the original film
Itβs a shame Cozzi didnβt bring back the ominous synth track from the Hiroshima title sequence. Maybe he re-uses it later?
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
As it goes on, you get used to the color.
The editing and pacing on the other handβ¦
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
"150m". Three times taller than in the originl already. They will probably keep that in mind in the city scenes. #monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
okay this is where I admit I haven't seen GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS! (1956) so some of my disorientation here is the rewriting of the story that is at the core of *this* version of the movie
so some of my "WTF" is really attributable to the American cut of the original film, and some of it lies with Signor Cozzi's reinterpretation of same
"reporter was there" is not a bad way to re-spin a film for a different audience at the time of the original film, and by 1977 Toho was well-aware of the value of their brand, so they had no strong compulsion to sell off the original film, I'm sure
Feels like a Dash Shaw graphic novel
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
Excessive credits, no?
Re: WWII footage in Cozzilla
The year before, the film All This and World War II was released, then pulled from theaters. It combined WWII newsreel footage with covers of Beatles songs.
All prints were rumored to be destroyed, but thereβs a copy on YT. How bad was it? Well, the opening credits introduce the Nazis, perpetrators of the Holocaust, set to βThe magical mystery tour is coming to take you away.β
How did this get made?
@patioboater Honestly, if you haven't seen the OG (original Godzilla, 1954) I would recommend stopping this travesty as soon as possible to avoid spoiling the experience.
I mean, there are movies that are interesting despite being terrible, and movies that are interesting because they're terrible, and this is neither. The interesting parts (IMO) mostly come straight from the OG, and it seems not worth putting up with the terrible parts when you could, y'know, just not.
That was interesting, thanks @ryan :)
I wonder, for someone in the 70s or 80s with limited access to foreign films, is it better to watch this or not bother with Godzilla at all. #monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
cutting in WWII footage does make the failure of the military to respond to Godzilla more prominent
like yea guys, AA into the clouds is not very effective with a kaiju who is decidedly not up in the clouds
"Why stop at incomprehensibly bad, when it can also be incomprehensible?" - Cozzi
The 1954 music still whips
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
oxigione destruccione
@diazona According to IMDB it's a mashup of Godzilla, the US Godzilla King Of Monsters, and 25 minutes of newsreel and WWII footage.
New soundtrack
"Colorization".
@combatwombat Also, if they mix red and green they get some brown, which sortof looks like skin tones.
They would do this trick in printing stills with purple and orange using two layer color separations instead of 3 or 4 to save money.
@combatwombat Oh good point!
@allanb "slop-tinted" sounds about right :D
But it also looks like they took the Italian flag, rotated it and painted it over the movie. Bottom green, top red, middle untouched. Sometimes reversed. #monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
@klu9 Not sure why a theater would want people occupying seats for longer periods of time though.
It sounds like a push to prevent patrons from getting ripped-off by overly-short B&W films, but who knows
This first Godzilla is so depressing
#Monsterdon #Monsterdondoublefeature
Apparently, cinema chains in Italy in the 70s wouldn't accept any feature film under 90 minutes or black & white, so Cozzi had to colourize it & pad it out (original Godzilla was 80 minutes).
He ended up padding it out to 105 minutes
This synth track is actually really cool
Anyone else getting audio stuttering on @miru ?
@combatwombat @ryan I'm voting no unless "No Godzilla" means being magically prohibited from *ever* seeing the OG, in which case, yeah I think it'd be worth sitting through this one
@ryan I vote Cozzilla for the #monsterdon ending alone. #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
there's a first time for everything, and this is the first time I've found the telling of the story of Gojira to be a boring one
fuck you Cozzi
This movie's best moments all come straight from another movie
@SnoopJ Ah cool cool, I kinda suspected but I found that the 1957 version actually did have Steve Martin as a character so wasn't sure
#monsterdon #wrongFrogs #italianGodzilla That Contra-Bassoon tho
@SnoopJ PRO-TIP: make most of your movie slow motion so you can hit the 90 minute runtime
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
y'know, with all the compression pixelation this thing gets kind of arty at times
Kind of unbelievable how this is so much less compelling than the original film despite using a lot of the same footage
@plaidtron3000 @diazona yea, there's a fairly interesting (from the standpoint of "how does the movie industry work" anyway) history to how this particular piece of cinema came to exist.
Including a cute #Monsterdon-flavored bit of trivia: Cozzi wanted the rights to GORGO (1960) but couldn't get them, and he called up Toho after that.
https://markdavidwelsh.wordpress.com/2022/11/01/godzilla-1977/
FantastiCozzi, documentary about tonight's director Luigi Cozzi
https://eggplant.place/movie/73bmsT0TRbiByvoZYWQG9g
Legit free streaming:
https://flixhouse.com/video/5793/fantasticozzi
@ohiofi Yeah, IMDB says it was a directorial choice to put gels over the film.
Mind boggling.
@ohiofi @plaidtron3000 You can never really tell with a #Monsterdon movie
@plaidtron3000 It does at least seem to be a new movie for the most part, not a re-edit. Most of this wasn't in the OG.
#monsterdon #wrongfrogs #italianGodzilla so wait, is the American version just scenes of Perry Mason being inserted into Gojira as if it's Jimmy Stewart and the goofy angel in "It's a Wonderful Life?"
@plaidtron3000 Deliberate? We think?
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
@klu9 Yeah, true.
So this is just an italian dub and re-edit of Godzilla, with ... are these color gel effects deliberate? Or is it that an effect from too many telecines? Or what?
It's a good thing Godzilla spared him, otherwise he wouldn't've been able to save a Mexican village from the infamous El Guapo.
Leave the color on? Or turn the saturation all the way down so itβs black and white?
#monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977 #cozzilla
@allanb Hmm now where have we seen that before π
wish i could stay up for the unofficial #monsterdonDoubleFeature because i've wanted to see this for some time! i might catch the first few minutes though
I had to bail to take a shower, but thanks @ryan for the miru special tonight, perfect choice, g'night everybody ^_^
Well that was a train wreck
Boat wreck?
Monster wreck?
...regardless, not the good kind
Thanks as always @ryan for hosting and everybody for posting! See you next week!
ahhhh not another "The End...?"
"Humanity is saved?"
no. Humanity was ruined by this movie.
Most dramatic bubbles ever
or, so says the soundtrack
And now he can be killed by artillery because we want to use all our amazing WW2 footage that goes bang. Eh. #monsterdon #monsterdondoublefeature #godzilla1977
Godzilla being killed off by oxygen-deprived water that his head is sticking up out of π΅βπ«
@strangefour And the water turns orange, apparently
Is Cozzilla a βmondoβ film?
TENTACLES!!!
Nothing like a children's choir for manufacturing drama /s
just amazing to see Cozzi's crude bullshit juxtaposed against like, actual filmmaking
the only strong reaction Cozzi's crude contributions to "gosh look how bad this is" elicit is disgust
#monsterdon
#monsterdondoublefeature
#italiangodzilla
Oof, Cozzi replayed footage from the same movie for a padded exposition.
"I told Ogawa and Steve" oof
one of these men is not like the other
one man's in it, one man's not
I gotta say, this focus on the injured and dead people in the aftermath of Godzilla's attack does not really fit with the vibe of the original movie
@diazona No, it's really not. It's a combination of surreality and blood, and... it kinda works.
Can't wait to see Burr doing standup and playing banjo.
That's going to happen soon, right?
@SnoopJ Me neither until I looked it up on IMDB
Definitely a possibility, although I'm worried it'd have a lot of the same issues as what we're watching now
Not the worst job with colorization of Godzilla's attack, honestly
@SnoopJ wait did you mean the 1957 French remake, or the 1954 original?
"Was that an actual person set on fire? You can guess, but you'll never know!" - Cozzi
Godzilla has a jingle
I'll give it this, the grainy low-res footage of Godzilla does actually work - it feels like a historical documentary
Everything else in this movie, not so much
@SnoopJ that explains a lot
Hey look, actual people actually dying in WWII, thanks Cozzi, you piece of shit.
Toho's Godzilla didn't use footage from Hiroshima or Nagasaki out of respect for the dead and injured.
Cozzi had no such qualms.
Hey look, actual WWII footage
"Toho disliked this version of the film, considering it an 'abomination'. They even went as far as having references to it removed from the audio commentary for the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray releases of Godzilla (1954)."
"Cozzi wanted to give an old film an 'up-to-date and more violent look,' so the director added real footage of death and destruction from war-time and Hiroshima stock footage, as well as scenes from [other monster movies]" - IMDB
I wonder if 50m in original got translated to 150 feet in US version, and that became 150m in this
"How did your experiments into using radio nucleotides to giganticise and mutate lizards go? Very well? That's outstanding!"
"It was terrifying" he says in a monotone voice