About the film
- Directed by
- Luigi Cozzi, Ishirō Honda, Terry O. Morse
- Released
- January 1, 1977
- Country
- Italy, Japan, United States of America
- Starring
- Raymond Burr, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kôchi
More credits
- Language
- Italian, Japanese
- Origin
- IT, JP, US
- Studios
- Paramount Pictures International, Documento Film, BBC di Renato Barbieri, COZZILLA s.r.l., Fonolux, TOHO, Toho Laboratory, Jewell Enterprises, Embassy Pictures
- Written by
- Shigeru Kayama, Luigi Cozzi, Tomoyuki Tanaka, Eiji Tsuburaya, Terry O. Morse, Takeo Murata, Ishirō Honda, Al C. Ward
- Produced by
- Tomoyuki Tanaka, Luigi Cozzi, Renato Barbieri, Iwao Mori, Joseph E. Levine, Terry Turner, Edward B. Barison, Harry Rybnick, Richard Kay, Harold Ross, Edmund Goldman, Paul Schreibman
- Cinematography
- Masao Tamai, Guy Roe
- Music
- Fabio Frizzi, Franco Bixio, Vince Tempera, Akira Ifukube
- Also starring
- Emilio Cigoli, Rita Savagnone, Giuseppe Rinaldi, Vittorio Cramer, Pino Locchi
In 1977, Luigi Cozzi secured the Italian rights to Godzilla (1954). Unable to sell the black and white film, he colored it himself. And padded it with actual news footage of war and death.
No technology for colorizing a film yet existed, so COZZILLA (1977), as fans came to call his version, was colored by hand, frame by frame, with colored gels laid over the image. The result is not color so much as a lurid, tie-dyed neon wash. He named the process Spectrorama 70 to make it sound like a blockbuster.
Needing the film to run longer, Cozzi added actual film of the atomic bombing of Japan and its victims. His Godzilla opens on the real bomb and the real dead. The original Godzilla was always a parable about the bomb. Cozzi dragged that buried horror up into the light.
Cozzi was no hack. He made Starcrash, has kept Dario Argento's horror shop in Rome for decades, and was a lifelong Godzilla obsessive, so this was devotion as much as commerce. The psychedelic poster he commissioned became the cover of the first issue of Fangoria, where a generation first saw the image with no idea what it came from.
Toho owns the color negative, the planned disc was scrapped, and Cozzilla survives only as a bootleg.
How to see Godzilla (1977)
Streaming
United States
No subscription, rental, or purchase options listed in United States right now.
Source: JustWatch
Physical media
Part of Godzilla - Showa Collection 1954-1976 - Collector's Edition
Movies they don’t want you to see
Related movies only streaming in other territories
Looking for matches…
Movies we wrote about
Starcrash (1978)
5 commentsGodzilla Minus One (2023)
2 commentsTarget Earth (1954)
9 commentsThe Visitor (1979)
20 commentsHouse (1977)
2 commentsAt the Meeting with Joyous Death (1973)
Films scored for your taste
We have to talk…
Godzilla Minus Zero (2026)Not quite as good as the first, but the best monster mash Godzilla movie for sure.
Capturing Bigfoot (2026)Honestly one of the best documentaries I've seen. That sounds like hyperbole, but it was a…
Trouble Every Day (2001)TROUBLE EVERY DAY is definitely an outlier in its graphic extremity, but saying Denis was known…
The Social Reckoning (2026)A little preachy and sanctimonious - maybe. But I wonder if that's just the climate we're…
Doppelgänger (1969)One of the best!
Death Race 2000 (1975)Saw this first run at a local drive-in and loved it. Still do. Still love the…
Man Bites Dog (1992)Rented this vhs in college a couple times. Hilarious and a good way to practice your…
Pandora's Box (1929)Great movie! 🌻
The Devil Rides Out (1968)Brilliant movie!!! "The Goat of Mendes! The Devil Himself!"
Three Colors: Red (1994)I can’t believe it came out 32 years ago! The wonderful, talented cinematographer Piotr Sobociński also…
Moontrap (1989)Worth the watch
Velvet Goldmine (1998)Mark Sebastian Jordan Bowie also produced all of Transformer.
Tim Paxton
HAHAH I have this on DVD — it was a VHS rip that I put on DVD for my own amusement.
Tim Paxton no way for you to share this dvd copy for a few of us sir? Would love to see and happy to preserve.
haha I just saw this in a movie theater last month. It was definitely a treat to see it on the big screen
Where can I download it in The Best image Version possible?
Henry Takimoto Jasa x2
A weird piece of film history, but respect for introducing more people to the big G
“He was no hack. He made Starcrash.” You see the problem here?
Michael Watters haha perhaps an unfortunate pairing of sentences!
Michael Watters – Exactly my first thought.
An upcoming Italian Blu-ray set containing all of the Showa Godzilla films will include Cozzilla as a bonus. The set is not authorized by Toho.
Wes Shad I haven’t heard of this, any source or reference?
Mario Delgado https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0GTZYP3NS
Mario Delgado
“Cozzi was no Hack” followed by “He made Starcrash” is like… Such a contradiction.
Dude was a hack, sorry. Also showing the real dead wasn’t an artistic statement, it was an exploitation filmmaker being exploitative.
Okay, yeah, that was an unfortunate pairing of statements. Having said that, shout out to Nellie Bly, one of my favorite historical figures!
And whaddya know, it’s on YouTube. If the link isn’t clickable, just search for it there.
https://youtu.be/l1qRxEY0USQ?is=lAM7HKbN7gosGnSE
Whoa 🤯
I never knew this story. Explains a lot of stills for it, that I always assumed were hand colored by other artists . Thanks for info !
In-cred-ible.
Here is the film is all it’s entirety.
https://archive.org/details/CozzillaRestoredGenoCuddy
“Cozzi was no hack. He made Starcrash” is hilarious. This sounds in even worse taste than that movie!
Oh I now see a lot of people beat me to this observation haha
What a mess.
When I was fifteen I saw StarCrash at a theater in March of 1979. Much creativity and good work there. To this day it’s one of my favorite movies. In the special features of both the DVD and Blu-ray versions of the Roger Corman’s Cult Classics edition, there is some talk from Cozzi of his colored Godzilla.
the way I heard it, he did NOT get the film rights haha And he still runs the italian horror/dario argento museum in italy. he’s a nice guy, and it’s not rare to run into him there.
Ed Fleece he got the rights to the U.S. cut. Not the original Japanese version.
Saw it in 1977 in a theater with Sensurround sound effects. Amazing!
My friend and I saw Starcrash on a double bill with Hooper. Starcrash was second on the bill. By the time the movie was over, my friend and I were the only two people left in an otherwise empty theater. Starcrash is a steaming pile of crap.
Maybe Cozzi wasn’t a hack then (Starcrash is actually really entertaining and Contamination is a certified Italian gore classic) but he got increasingly consumed by the coloring book ”style” and cosmic nonsense making its way into every project regardless of the genre… Despite its intentional ”laughs”, The Blood on the Méliès Moon is not much fun to sit through
I’ve always wanted to see this.
What needs to happen is releasing Godzilla vs The Wolfman, even in its incomplete form. Where, technically, Toho didn’t do it, but some from the studio did work on it on the side. Setup with a suit similar to the one from King Kong vs Godzilla and full suit of a giant Wolfman ready to go (with scenes already filmed), this would have been a very fun Saturday matinee. It’s a shame, though, the project never finished because this looked and sounded really cool. Kind of went into the crossover themes the Big G was going to be a part of and what he’s been crossing over into: Frankenstein, Batman, a sequel to KK vs G, etc. It’s actually pretty awesome that G vs WM was, for all intents and purposes, a fan film and has inspired many other fans to come up with their own projects. Maybe someone will revisit the Wolfman project someday, with suits and not AI.
Havent they been coloring films like that since the 1900’s? Man in the Moon is also in color the same way
Calico Kat Flores here’s an Italian history lesson for you
The juxtaposition of the sentence is “he’s no hack” and “he made Starcrash” ….
Saw this on 35mm at Exhumed Films’ 25-Hour Horrorthon years ago. Pristine print too!