Godzilla

Godzilla

Godzilla (1977)

Share

Where to Watch

No US streaming, rental, or purchase options listed right now.

Source: JustWatch

Physical Media

No DVD, Blu-ray, or other disc editions listed yet.

Submit a Correction

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.

About the Film

The greatest apocalpyse in the history of cinema

Directed By
Luigi Cozzi, Ishirō Honda, Terry O. Morse
Runtime
96 minutes
Released
January 1, 1977
Country
Italy, Japan, United States of America
Starring
Raymond Burr, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kôchi
More Credits
Genres
Science Fiction, Horror
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
Luigi Cozzi, Renato Barbieri, Tomoyuki Tanaka, Iwao Mori, Joseph E. Levine, Terry Turner, Edward B. Barison, Harry Rybnick, Richard Kay, Harold Ross, Edmund Goldman, Paul Schreibman
Cinematography
Guy Roe, Masao Tamai
Music
Franco Bixio, Fabio Frizzi, Vince Tempera, Akira Ifukube
Also Starring
Emilio Cigoli, Rita Savagnone, Giuseppe Rinaldi, Vittorio Cramer, Pino Locchi

This website uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.

More like this

Comments

Sign in to add to the conversation… Back to top

  8. “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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. 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

  22. 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.

Copyright Anywhere But Hollywood. All rights reserved.