Luigi Cozzi is 72 years.... young today. Though he's not made a film in some time, how nice is it that he's lived to see his most fertile period become immortalized on disc and stream? His place in the pantheon of Italian genre auteurs assured thanks to the rise of cults like Alamo and boutiques like Arrow, Scorpion, Synapse, and Severin, Cozzi, out there behind the Profundo Rosso counter, can bask in cult glory of the sort denied to those who died too soon (like Ed Wood). Poor Ed, ignored by the mainstream, too poor to stay as drunk as he'd like, it was as if Ed's cult couldn't rise except like a no-so-virgin spring from his own self-despoiled corpse. Well, many of us debauched libertines would gladly die in anonymity if we were assured of posthumous immortality, even as a cult 'so-bad-it's-good' auteur like Wood. But Cozzi lives! He's still swinging.
I've heard Cozzi wrestles with his "Italian Ed Wood" mantle, but I get the impression that, being a genre fan himself, he gets it's a term of endearment. Calling Cozzi or Wood 'bad' or 'inept' is like decrying Basquiat for bad spelling, or Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for being anatomically incorrect. Whether or not these acclaimed artists did these deviations for an effect or just were bad at drawing and writing shouldn't matter in the least. If it does, doesn't that make you kind of a bourgeois snob? Cozzi should know that those of us who call him that love Ed Wood. We love Wood way better than, say, classical journeymen we only admire like Robert Wise, Fritz Lang, or Stanley Kramer. Better to be loved than respected. Better to rule the cult fest midnight revival hell than earn polite applause in bourgeois film snob heaven. And if you can be alive to see your cult cheer your name onscreen, even if its Anglicized (as "Lewis Coates"), you know your work is going to span the ages in ways so many of your more critically-lauded peers will not. Plan Nine has a cult as big all outdoors. I've seen it myself probably 100 or more times and could watch it right now. But The Day the Earth Stood Still? That acclaimed 'smart' classic of the genre? I've seen it maybe twice. It's just too sanctimonious to make revisiting it over and over a pleasurable experience (Gort aside).
Today we see Cozzi himself a lot, drifting merrily through DVD extras, palling around with Quentin Tarantino and the rest. And hey, Cozzi's canon is completely on DVD and available to all mankind. So he's
I mention Ed Wood for a reason: like his
Bride of the Monster, Plan Nine and
Night of the Ghouls, Cozzi's most iconic work was released in a brief fertile period, approx. 1978-85--Stretching from
Star Wars-influenced
Starcrash in 1978 through to
Alien-influenced
Contamination in 1980, to the
Conan-influenced
Hercules in 1983 (and its sequel in 1985 - both below)
. And if, as with Wood, we laugh while watching, it's the
best kind of laughter, a joyful realization Cozzi genuinely loves the genre, maybe more than he should for the good of the narrative. He aims for the stars and lets the small stuff melt into abstraction. We who love him cheer the way that--like Wood's-- his movies go racing through gonzo set-ups with clear love of the sources they borrow from (in addition to the
Star Wars borrowings,
Starcrash affectionately nods to
Golden and
Seventh Voyage(s)
of Sinbad, and
Flash Gordon), delivering all the things we remember and want to see again, regardless of whether he has to switch to analog video effects to achieve them.
Like the Wood oeuvre, we can watch Cozzi's films, over and over in ways we may not be able to do with the originals they homage.
Clash of the Titans and
Jason and the Argonauts both drag with long, boring scenes of courtly intrigue). Cozzi skips all that because he knows what makes myth work, and we realize just how much imagination and archetypal resonance can override any alienation from the Brechtian meta-textual 'seams-showing' artistry.
More than just rip-offs or homage, his films become like pagan idols, bowing to down to the celluloid image
themselves. It's the kind of thing we see in the
DIY recreations of blockbuster films in Michel Gondry's work, or that 1989 Mississippi homegrown student film
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Not to say Cozzi's work is amateur-ish, but rather it generates a feeling of reverential ceremonial mimetic magic. Unlike so many of his less cosmic-minded contemporaries, Cozzi would rather fail on a big stage than just show some fake-breasted frizzy-haired lady racing around a misty warehouse for 90 minutes like many of his contemporaries (I'm looking at you, Fragasso!) Cozzi's films never skimp on ideas nor do they waste time with long dialogue scenes or laborious set-ups, nor do they engage in 'filler' practices to eat up the time; they zip around from planet to planet, from labor to labor, climax to climax, packing their vignettes with savages, monsters, gods, demons, stop motion animation and video infinity effects and most of all... lovely women in strong roles.
Also, we celebrate Cozzi today because his films score big on the Bechdel. There might be cleavage involved, but his camera seldom stoops to leering. Stylish costumes clothe capable characters whose Bechdel scores outpace any of his more acclaimed blockbusters (ala Tolkien, Harry Potter and Star Wars). Far ahead of the curve on that aspect, Cozzi gives us a bevy of heroines and villainesses and those who could be either. Rather than just bland princesses, flirty secretaries. or imperiled doormats, Cozzi's women are space pilots, CDC colonels, witches, queens (not mere princesses), goddesses, and agents of chaos magic - most of whom never try to seduce or be seduced. Love scenes don't really exist in Cozzi land, we're wayyy past that. Look at his casts and they're almost all (or at least equally) women, everyone of them playing a strong female character.
So here's wishing you the best of birthdays, Luigi Cozzi! And to celebrate, a round-up of past reviews of plus a deep look into one of my recent and most cherished recent discoveries, an unfairly ignored and forgotten relic from Cannon films, made in the wake of the
post-CONAN sword and sorcery craze
HERCULES (1983)
****
When your only takable umbrage with a Cannon
neo-peplum is a tacky corset worn by Sybil Danning (
top) as the evil princess Adriana, then you know you are blessed by the refreshingly primitivist and un-tacky Lewis Coates (Cozzi's Americanized alias) once again. File it, as I did, in my emergency reserves, right next to
Plan Nine or
Mesa of the Lost Women, something to bring on your laptop over Xmas when you need a break from your brother's loud shouting at Alexa. Most Hercules films are unpleasant to see
once, let alone often but I can see Cozzi's
Hercules over and over until the end of time. To get to the perfect 'all-flaw' gem facets of lovely classics like
The Car, The Devil's Rain, and
Ghosts of Mars a sword-and-sandal film needs to have a wild imagination and a love of movies that overrides limitations. Cozzi would rather
try for a time lapse change from an old witch face to a lovely enchantress than to just cheat it out with cut-to another character's surprised reaction shot the way lesser directors would (no matter if it works or not), and better to
have a hydra --even if it only has three heads, none of which move, except to slightly raise or lower the necks to breathe fire--than to have
no hydra at all. Better to have Hercules stand semi-transparently in the middle of outer space, flexing his mighty biceps, then to just see him rolling around in the De Paolis dust. In each of his 'effects' Cozzi all but salutes some older movie he's clearly in awe of. Like Tarantino, he's a true fan of the genre/s. And if you have fond memories of making movies as a kid (or now) and love seeing the seams, ala Ed Wood (like a magic show where the wires are visible), then you love Cozzi.
And he clearly loves you.
 |
Mirella D'Angelo (Tenebrae) as Circe, the witch
disciple of Athena who helps Hercules |
See,
Hercules isn't just about a muscle-head smashing foes, there's also lessons in astronomy and of the everlasting battle between science and chaos vs. the forces of the gods: we learn the planets were formed from broken shards of Pandora's water jar; we learn how the constellations got their names and shapes (Hercules threw monsters into deep space, like a bear who became Ursus Major, etc.); and that the four elements that comprise the universe are: night, day, matter, and air. (Never mind how day and night are measured before the formation of a spinning Earth). We learn that the gods were the first beings, fashioned on the Earth, and they settled on the moon to better observe and judge the tests of mankind, dressed in the high-art gowns, crowns and shawls that represent the divine fusion or art deco and Italian disco. We spend quite awhile out there in the forming universe, for this is a Hercules movie that never loses sight, not only of the gods, but of elementals like 'fire' (the imprisoned firebird, never seen except as orange light) and chaos (whose spirit manifests in Eva Robbins, sublime in a bat-winged gold lamé skullcap and a gold codpiece and cape (carrying weird echoes of her 'heel'-work in
Tenebrae).
Thus, there on the surface of the moon, do we find Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli) refereeing a game betwixt the astringent Hera (Rossana Podesta) and the compassionate Athena (Delia Boccardo) over Hercules' fate, sending in their respective servants on earth to aid or abet him on his epic quest, eye laser-zapping some serpent or other into existence to aid or abet mighty Hercules. That champion of men!
With his huge jaw set against the world, Lou "TV's Hulk" Ferrigno (well-dubbed by familiar voice artist Marc Smith) may get a lot of flak for his limited range as an actor, but he was perfect for that show as he does have a gift for screaming in rage. He also a way with seeming deep inside himself, unfazed by threats or challenges, but then reacting to stimulus with the sudden reckless energy of a five year-old, eyes squinting to indicate focus on some magical spectacle and they widen when roused to sudden violence. When he hears his father is in the process of being slain by a bear he drops his harness (he's ploughing a field by yoking himself to a Carnac-like row of massive stones, for some reason) and shouts "WHAT?" It's like he just saw his car getting a ticket from across the street while getting his third coffee of the morning. He has a great run, as his big muscles somehow mesh perfectly with his little but super fast steps, like a six year-old running from a barking dog. He's huge but moves like a bantam weight prize fighter as opposed to a heavy pro wrestler like say, his rival Arnold. Yes, all in all, Ferrigno is the perfect choice for the mighty Hercules! He's not a good enough actor to hide his real self from us--there's no duplicity in him or his Hercules--he's trying hard, giving it his all, but wisely he's not trying so hard he casts a dour pall over things the way, say, Zalman King or Jason Patric would. This makes him perfectly in sync with Cozzi's innate cosmic primitivism.
As Herc's romantic lead/princess-in-distress, Cassiopea (Ingrid Anderson) spends most of her scenes in sexy white linens, first wearing a veil over her face then, after Herc lifts the veil and gives her a kiss, she's abducted and next time we see her she's wearing a trippy golden crown, her breasts tastefully cupped by scallop shells (no leering but beautiful side views). Made "sweet and submissive" thanks to the 'black lotus' (mmmm, yes-please). Waiting to be burnt alive as "a bride" of Minos' captured firebird/phoenix, she becomes a kind of dormant anima to Hercules, keeping him pure so that he resists the come-ons of both his benefactor witch friend Circe (Mirella D'Angelo) and the evil Adriana (Sybil Danning) and good (agent of Athena). As that glam chaos agent Daedalus (
above, left) helps Minos on his path to killing all the gods and initiating the age of 'pure' science, by launching a series of erector set monsters from atop her giant waxy head in the land between time and space. i.e, "chaos in the name of science! Science in the name of chaos!" claims the evil king Minos (William Berger) flashing those weird William Berger teeth at the macabre delights of her monsters which he realizes-- time and space being relative, will be huge and deadly on Earth.
Who could imagine three erector set monsters displayed by a lady in a codpiece and batwing skullcap atop standing on giant skull candle deep in the Steve Ditko-esque space beyond space would ever be in a Hercules movie!? Compared to all this, the ponderous posturing of Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave in the overlong Clash of the Titans is like sitting through a boring 7th grade Greek history class vs. sneaking out to play video games at Space Port.
Though Cozzi stacks his decks with strong female characters, there are also some cool characters on the male side too, though their faces are often obscured by unconvincing beards: Gianni (Sartana!) Garko shows up in a crazy red and gold-winged refurbished centurion costume with a helmet ridge that look like a giant fan paint brush. As Zeus, Cassinelli should be familiar to Italian crime genre fans (though with his droopy white beard somehow makes him seem kind of Linus Roche-like); and Bobby Rhodes (the pimp in Demons!) is the King of Africa, who shows up on a rocky beach for one scene (but has a languid white chick drooped at his side, and a coterie of all-white hipster dudes as the slaves carrying his litter, which is awesome on so many levels). Circe grows Hercules to giant size so he can break the mountain and build his people a waterway and thus be granted use of Pegasus's Pegasus-less chariot, currently stashed in yonder cave ("and that's how, with the help of the Gods, Hercules created the great continents," intones the narrator, "by separating Europe from Africa.") Adding the right measure of rock-straight dignity to the film's Pecos Bill/Paul Bunyon-style tall tale mythos, that narration is the icing on the cake. And if Cozzi's budget couldn't swing a Pegasus ("the winged horses are lost in infinity!"), mighty Hercules just throws a big temple boulder out of orbit and has Circe fashion a magic rope to tie it to the chariot (there's a great stop motion bit where the rope ties itself into a very cool sailor's knot, seriously, that is some wild-ass knot. And with that, Circe and Hercules are soaring across the solar system, completely out of our planetary orbit, being pulled along in an open air chariot by a giant.... rock, just to be able to come down on what is, presumably, earth again. Lesser directors would never even dare try to get away with that, or using erector sets to make stop motion monsters. Cozzi never says 'never.' And if you listen closely to all the magic spells going on here, and there a lot, a whole uniquely fractured cosmology bends and weaves into a new sort of physics, right before your ears. It's marvelous in its Pagan purity.
As he did with
Starcrash, Cozzi somehow even manages to get an A-list composer to deliver a dynamite full-bodied score to something that would normally be subject to "library" tracks. He allegedly tricked John Barry into doing a score that can outdo John Williams in intergalactic bombast with
Starcrash. Here he gets the legendary Pino Donaggio to deliver a prime mythic, hugely entertaining, even more bombastic score, full of
Rocky-style coliseum brass and moody deep string ominousness. Did Cozzi prevent him Donaggio from seeing the movie during his composing, like he famously did with John Barry? I'd almost wager... Otherwise they would have, at the very least, lightened the heroic mood and maybe added some tacky lighter passages, But it's just that heroic mood that makes it all work. A single Les Baxter-style wink or goddamned mechanical owl and the whole thing would deflate like a soufflé.
The dubbing too is all first-rate too, even the minor characters get professional well-recorded treatment, with Donaggio's leitmotif giving every absurd action the benefit of the doubt. This is a film that never tries to be realistic; it gets to the heart of what
myth truly is. There is seldom a throwaway line; gods are called forth and raining monsters and magic onto the earth nonstop. The only monologues are incantations; as if this pre-ordained saga, reflected in macro- and micro- dimensions as surely as any archetypal truth. This approach explodes the barriers between accidental Brechtianism, pure escapist mythmaking, and a child showing off his toy collection. Cozzi throws everything he has in the box at us, including Zeus-knows-what kind of filters and pieces of rainbow-reflective mylar held over the lens, mismatched matte paintings overlaid with multi-colored stars (white, red, blue, yellow, green, even purple) but it's never excessive the way this much action would be in a craftsmanship-moribund Richard Fleischer-esque A-list event, or some Zak Snyder CGI fest, with so many wrong choices it collapses into bombast and people start walking out after 20 minutes, like
Sucker Punch or Justice League
. It is, in its sublime perfection, the very nature of magic.
Then the sequel in 1985: Lots of light effects, overlays, fan art inspiration, clips from the last film, and everything a-nice.
ADVENTURES OF HERCULES (1985)
Sixteen viewings in and I'm still trying to stay awake through it all, and I don't mean that as a negative. For me, it's like falling into a peaceful dream, one punctuated by occasionally druggy reveries, mythic parallels and name-that-influence excitement, like you'd get from a child proudly waving his tracing paper drawing of the Harryhausen cyclops, rousing you from a languid nap but not in a groggy way, a proud way, since you were the one who showed him
Golden Voyage of Sinbad . My only caveats: the terrible bangs on the overly-layered, super square wigs of all the female characters (it's like a 1985 high school performance of Phaedra after the drama teacher 'styled' all the wigs while drunk and angry). The god's costumes have grown so layered, overstuffed and bulky it's as if their trying to sneak out of their hotel without paying, so wearing all their outfits at once. Zeus is still played by Claudio Cassinelli but instead of his simple tiara and droopy white beard, he's given a big stuffy glittery 'Santa Claus does a christening' robe with a weird too small yarmulke that's seems to be part mixing bowl. And the tired look of surprise in the 'Colin Ferrell as an old queen trying one last time to get into Studio 54'-red feather glam of the evil priest (Ventatino Ventinini), his red eye shadow barely visible against his ravaged face (but his red feather coat is dreamy) when a fire monster animation comes out to devour its 'victim.' So yeah, it's not perfect.
But the fire monster turns out to be a an orange/white animation rotoscoped in part from Forbidden Planet's "monster from the Id" and when Hercules sends in his electric outline to battle King Minos (back from beyond), they become rotoscoped outlines of the ('33) King Kong fighting the T-rex and the snake (and Minos' goofy spinning sword fighting style is back from the first film); there's also a (fairly primitive but nonetheless badass) claymation Medusa / giant scorpion hybrid (mixing two Clash of the Titans monsters into one); plenty of Tron-like light video game effects (the funniesT being when Herc punch-bounces a ball of light around a canyon), and an Excalibur-referencing forest of hanging souls ruled by a white knight. The Nino Rota coliseum theme music is back, and still great, but the dubbing is badly mixed; Lou Ferrigno gets to keep the great Marc Smith doing his, thank goodness, and he stays refreshingly deadpan, but there's a different guy doing Minos's voice and he mispronounces 'Daedalus'!
Ferrigno however stays shirtless; he's totally shredded. The sets have painted on features so they resemble Dubuffet sculptures. But there's also a scene at the ever-eerie Parco dei Mostri in Bornazo, with the stone monsters' eyes glowing purple and red as Herc and the girls fight slime monsters.
The plot has the gods basically divided, as a cabal of rebels try to overthrow Zeus by stealing and hiding his six thunderbolts! The lady playing evil Hera is different and suddenly we get Laura Lenzi (the cute mom in
Manhattan Baby) as another evil goddess, Flora (?), who thinks it's a good idea to revive the evil Minos via that old upside down blood donor trick from Hammer's
Dracula, Prince of Darkness ("Minos..... not again" groans Hercules). Berger flashes his best maniac grin once he's imbued with the power of "cunning, connivance, and chaos" thanks to Daedalus (again played by Eva Robbins) and given an ice sword forged by Cronus. Lots of other overdressed rebel gods zap in and out of the dimensions of time and space, or stand on giant surrealist mesas above bubbling matte paintings and below rainbow-starred outer space, evoking the weird trans-dimensional zones of 60s Jack Kirby comics.
In short, I could watch this movie endlessly on repeat. There's not a single dull moment. Cozzi loves his sources and he knows how to bundle mythic influences together in such a way as to make a movie endlessly fascinating, and relaxing. He unerringly zones in on the things that make our favorite genre movies so re-watchable, but it's one thing to ape the Olympus scenes in
Crash of the Titans and
Jason and the Argonauts and another to actually make those scenes not boring; one thing to like Harryhausen's Medusa animation, but another thing to not overdo it. Cozzi gets rid of the cutesty owls, and the big cast of 'real' actors trying to turn it all respectable and inert, the betrayals and complications. He replaces all that have an androgyne agent of chaos in the zone beyond time and space, helping the evil king kill all the gods with big lazer zaps and ice swords. When mortal characters step outside space and time to consult the gods they wave their arms around to give off trippy trails, supporting my theory on where the many arms of Hindu deities come from (see my post on
Dvinorum Psychonauticus). If necessary, they'll die at the big skull temple or walk underwater to meet three mermaids..
I haven't even mentioned the lasers, sexy mermaids communicating via telepathy (ala Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women?), the crazy painted/scratched-on lightning, or that the cast consists of at least 3/4 women and none of them either sexually objectified or maternally consoling. A horny Amazon queen might turn out to be a giant spider, but that's to be expected.
Sure, it's still a step down for the mighty Cozzi after the 'heights' of the previous film/s, but somehow there's even more monsters and priceless lines are still delivered dead straight. Here's some of my favorites: "Quick! Step inside the stone mouth!;" "Mother, give me the kiss of death.;" "Didn't you say the little people always spoke in truth?" "Your death shall free the souls!" "Be careful of the queen, Hercules, she is the most evil of all!" And Zeus raising his arms up high "Grow, Hercules! Growww!" so he can stop the moon from colliding into the earth.
In short, if Cozzi is the Italian Ed Wood, this is clearly his
Night of the Ghouls and that's a high compliment. Look fast for a shot of the rock-pulled chariot from the first film pulling into view from behind the moon during one of the many astral zip-arounds. Once Cozzi films some outer space stuff, you bet he's going to use it in every film thereafter, and why the hell not? It's awesome!
Here it is, the source of myth, beyond time and space itself! It is here that Cozzi reigns.
SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS (1989)
Lou Ferrigno is back in Cozzi country with a stop-over in Castellari-land, for this dopey-but impossible to dislike entry in the pre-CGI fantasy genre. The great Marc Richards isn't doing his dubbing this time, and his hair makes him seem like a juiced-up Eric Bogosian (with earrings) and his face is such he really benefits from a Herc-style beard or at least a wash of green makeup, so that's an issue. Another is the nearly omnipresent narration by a a dubbed Daria Nicolodi reading the Story of Sinbad (written by Edgar Allen Poe?) to her child in bed. If Daria got to read her own lines in a throaty Helena Markos Italian, it would probably rock, but otherwise it's annoying. While I'm getting the complaints out of the way, there's way too much John Steiner doing the histrionic coded-gay tantrum-prone cartoon villain routine. (He should have studies the great Conrad Veidt's sensitive Jafar in the 1940 British version, instead of Disney's)
Sigh-- so if you can get past these things--the hair, the narration, the hissy-fit hamming, it's typically looney-tunes Cozzi nonstop weird fun action, anchored, or burdened by, Castellari-shot releatively big budget Arabian comic book setting, strong female characters (though a bodybuilder with an odd pitch-shifted voice who Jafar brings in as an ally doesn't do much except stand around and bitch and belittle him- one gets the impression Cozzi didn't know what to do with her, so just let her and Steiner improv, and like so many who can't, she didnt get the 'yes-and' so just shuts every potential idea volleyed her way)
It was a troubled production, upset by Cannon's meddling. According to lore, it was started Cozzi, but Cannon for some reason decided it was so good it should be a series they'd sell to TV. Cozzi couldn't do a series as he had prior engagements, so they replaced with him with Enzo G. Castellari (
1990: The Bronx Warriors and Warriors of the Wasteland) which turned out to be a bad decision as he went over budget shooting three hours of basically worthless footage. So Cozzi stepped back in to clean up the mess by adding narration to minimize how many scenes needed to be dubbed and--as he is wont to do--inserted many shots, masks, set pieces, and effects from his earlier or contemporary films (including the mask from
Paganini Horror, the skull island from
Hercules, the slime monsters from
Adventures of..) My guess: Enzo completed the earlier (relatively) ornate but totally static picture book port and palace scenes, but our dear "Coates" took over around the 1/3 way point, which is when it finally gets awesome. The boilerplate
Thief or Baghdad adventure (Jafar hypnotizing the king so he can make a play for his comely daughter) suddenly skips a groove and becomes an
Adventures of Hercules redux where each monster has a thunderbolt or (this time) a magic gem our hero (that champion of men) needs to reclaim. The fey evil Jaffar (John Steiner) can't quite match the 'science for the sake of science' happy King Minos but when we're told by the narrator that he threw a bunch of stones around the world so the magic that would free the girl or something and whisked onto a wild fractured voyage to liberate various gems from inside various monsters, we suddenly love him. Thank you, Jafar, for liberating us from the boring
Thief of Bagdad Fairy Tale Theater mise-en-scene and bumping us ahead six acts straight to the action!
As I say, the drawbacks are there: the mom dub, the pouffy hair, Steiner telling his pitch-shift-voiced female bodybuilder 'ally' Soukra (Teagan Clive): "you're really spoiling my biorhythm!" (the best she can moan as a retort is "have you taken your medications this morning?" ugh, it might not have sounded so negative before it was pitch-shifted down, but now it's like she's sucking the air out of the room), but at least Steiner seems to having a good time, doing very little but tottering around a giant weird red geodesic set while watching Sinbad's adventures via crystal ball, all while the lovely princess Alina (Alessandra Martines) lays tied up and helpless below. In perhaps a nod to Jess Franco, there's mysterious blood-red liquid pulsing in the tubes above her, attempting some kind of torturous mind control, or Oz witch's hourglass-style slow fuse to add suspense.
He seems to really camp up his hetero-normative yen for her - and we can see why, she's de-gorgeous, but there's something missing there. And so we know Cozzi probably oversaw the set (it evokes the weird zones occupied by the gods and Deadalus' weird Kirby-esque chaos realms of the Hercules films) but Castellari did the filming and maybe the A-list dubbing artists were clearly too busy.
But hey, Ferrigno gets to do lots of flexing in some pure Cozzi tussles, as when he wrestles with an animated bird cage (a very long sequence in which Ferrigno gives his all) or knocks heads off rock monsters or pulls out beating hearts with faces on them. He has the habit of throwing his sword away at the first sign of trouble, just so he can use his fists (though he can't be punching hard, as the foes just bounce back up and attack again and again with no loss of vigor). In the justifiably famous climax, he fights himself --which side won? We did! In prime TV wrestling style, after winning a fight on some faraway ailse, he points at Jafar as if sensing the eyes watching him from the crystal ball screen above the princess' geodesic prison and declares he's next. "I'm coming for you next, Ja-
Farr!"
The cast includes--as usual for Cozzi--plenty of strong women aside from Soukra, like a bunch of Amazons, whose queen (Melonee Rogers) makes men fall in love with her through her evil dances. Sinbad gets his own girl, Kyra (Stefania Goodwin - Bronx Warriors), the fun and capable daughter (with refreshingly endearing, natural-voiced dubbing) of a terribly overacting Depp-x-Mike Meyers-ish wizard with zee ridiculous mustache. It's worth it as Sinbad's new love is wondrous in her chill realness: fun, relaxed, not afraid to deliver some serious punches and kicks in the battle with the gooey lepers. There's some great footage shot from inside the basket of an actual balloon floating over the water towards an actual ship, while Sinbad blows into the balloon to keep them all from sinking. It's silly but it's clearly real people down there on a real slim period boat, filmed from a real balloon, with the real actors in it. And Herc and Kyra and her dad really in a balloon basked over the ocean. Did I mention the amazons? Cozzi forever!!!!
Anyway, Soukra and Jaffar aside, the general air is compassionate. Little person Cork Hubbert is a comic relief crew member (the first in a Cozzi film, probably Castellari's idea) and--though forced into some ridiculous contrivances--is at least treated with relative dignity; the crew is a little too 'colorful' for their own good though, each trying hard in too-clean and colorful costume and ornate facial hair to make sure you get the type they represent: Viking, Asian martial artists, Scottish ass-kicker, like some international warrior Village People, but hey, they all fight with rollicking good cheer and relative skill (were they stuntmen?) and they don't get in the way when its time for Ferrigno to do some wild feat, like break chains, run and/or swim in slow motion, knock a horse to the ground, climb up a ladder made of snakes, fight an empty suit of armor that shoots lasers out of its eyes, or resist the temptation of the Amazons! You can do it, Sinbad! ("You chose the wrong side... Dorita!
")
As with
Starcrash (also with amazons, come to think of it. so is
The Adventures of Hercules), the Achilles' heel del Cozzi is in full effect, namely a badly-mixed English dub that makes everyone sound like they're right up close to the microphone (i.e. voices not mixed in relation to character's distance) and clearly lacking a good English speaking dialogue director like we'd get with, say, Lucio Fulci. On the other hand, the cinematography is great, giving it a far more expensive patina than one would expect; and that two-tier, red metal-banded supervillain play pen set is pretty wild, I guess we can't have astral planes with giant resin heads and androgynous chaos godesses and, hair or no, Ferrigno is impossible to dislike. His romance with Kyra is a late-inning highlight that's just so strangely right it makes me feel young and invested again. So just get over the overpoweringly cloying narration and the sometimes wearying bitchiness of Soukra and Jaffar. And savor the Cozzi-llari Sinbadness while ye may, for methinks its type will not come again.
PAGANINI HORROR (1989)
A music video shoot for an all-girl rock band goes down at the historic landmark home of infamous violin virtuoso Paganini. It all goes awry when the all-girl rock band start disappearing during the breaks. Seems a masked ghost ala the Phantom of the Opera is stabbing them with a bladed violin after luring them forth via candles and typical horror-rock fantasy settings. Cool as that all is, it's plenty clear something or someone prevented Cozzi's full vision from being realized; a producer somewhere along the line nixed the kind of lunatic touches that would have made the film distinctly late-80s Cozzi. (I hear there's a German version that includes a prologue showing planetary movements, a celestial hourglass or scales or something indicating the cosmic balance). This naysaying producer clearly wanted this to be a gory slasher movie and to the devil with Cozzi's cosmic fatalism.
See, Italy had a kind of film subject future's market of bandwagon jumping --which meant they would find out what big new film was in the works, then make a smaller, quicker riff on the same subject, to kind of ride free on someone else's publicity budget. But to make sure the quick cash-in film was released at the same time, before, or right after with titles and a big budget you had to start production before said bigger budget film was even released, hence the gamble. So this big budget Paganini biopic was coming out, and there was already a rip-off version in the works at other studios. Hence Paganini Horror. BUT then the epic main movie tanked out, so Cozzi lost the high art tentpole he probably planed to use in defense of the high weirdness going on and the quick easy buck of the slasher took over.
The final compromise involves a booby trap-rigged house, steeped in occult ritual thanks to Paganini's horrible history--that Daria Nicolodi rents out to a video shoot run by a Dario Argento-style horror maven who can't quite figure out how to keep shooting when the (very cool) all girl 80s Euro-rock band starts disappearing (he solves it by making use of the copious available mannequins). The only way to survive is to master Paganini's final score (copped from Donald Pleasance in a back alley of Venice) well enough to play it backwards before the maestro's masked spirit kills again!
The worst part of it all actually is that Donald Pleasance is dubbed by someone else!! What's the point? His voice is everything! Still, as with the best Cozzis (
above and below) what saves it all and makes it a true gem is the real palpable love and respect for the genre, and for strong women, that suffuses everything. When they gaze into camera for the video, you can read deep into the girl band's souls and they seem to be having a high old time making this film. The cinematography is lovely, captured in burnished oranges and browns, with lots of candles, and --alas--it's all too short, with a hyper-ironic, if unsatisfying, ending. Maestro! Did you have to kill the cute bassist chick first! Aye shalom! (full review of Blu-ray
here)
Earlier COZZI CANON (previously covered)
STARCRASH (1978)
Starcrash moves so fast from cliffhanger to cliffhanger it has less to do with its obvious 'inspiration' and more in common with one of those compressed feature film versions of the 1936 serial
Flash Gordon (right down the helmets, and the hero's escaping his/her stint shoveling fuel into the enemy blast furnace) crossed with the
Golden and
7th Sinbad Voyages. And it has even less to do with actual science, which is a relief. The John Barry score is far better than John Williams' score for
Star Wars; the sets, guns, and costumes are all super kinky and wild; outer space is laden with lava lamp overlays and stars as varied in color and size as a drunk Xmas tree. Christopher Plummer--decked out in a kind of Versace sci-fi hallucination-- gets to shout out to a far off space ship that he will now "freeze time itself!" and as his son, David Hasselhof has never looked prettier. Clearly Cozzi lavished attention on weird details like kinky cool costumes, crazy sets, and wild giddy imagination, but left choices for the clunky English dub, and editing, in less wondrous hands. The cast is great but only half of them, since the extra value they would have brought doing their own voices is lost. (Plummer keeps his though). There's also the issue of Marjoe Gortner who comes off like a tooth-whitened Vegas magician crossed with an over-caffeinated animatronic Peter Pan (and his hair is curly). Stella has a lot of sexy and slick outfits though, with wide Vampirella collars. The diaper/chastity belt thing is not a good look however. Released in America by New World Pictures, so as with their other films, it has to clock in at under 90 minutes irregardless of how many sets and action set pieces are going on, leading to a giddy rushed feel (
Star Wars lest Roger forget, clocked in at a healthy 2+ hours)
(full review here)
CONTAMINATION (1980)
This Italian ALIEN-inspired sci-fi adventure gets a bad rap in some circles but I adore it. Rather than just have some amok alien eating crew members, this keeps itself on Earth in the present, and decides to focus in on the pod-to-stomach-stage, with rows of ugly watermelon slime pods that explode when ripe and cause instant explosions in the stomach of everyone in horseshoe vicinity. I dig the obvious phone book size padding under the victim's shirts before the explosions; I dig the traumatic Freudian-cave-on-Mars flashbacks; the unearthly humming whale-ish noise the pods make when they're fixing to blow. I dig the vibe between the NYC cop who discovers the initial shipment (Marino Mase), the female colonel (!) of the Army's special disease control unit (Louise Marleau) and the traumatized astronaut (Ian McCulloch). The three team up in a sexy 'gentleman's agreement' synergy and head down to Colombia where they're soon ensnared up in a big slimy alien's world domination plan, ala
It Conquered the World.
Louise Marleau's heroine finds a worth opposite number in lovely blonde Gisela Hahn as the evil mastermind's right hand, and I love the alien itself, especially that bicycle reflector eye and the glistening artichoke coloring. Lastly, what really earns my goofball admiration is the Goblin soundtrack. That late-70s-80s European prog rock style has aged well. I don't know what else you need to make you love this dumbass film the way that I do. Whatever's missing, you don't need it.
THE BLACK CAT
AKA Demons 6: De Profundus (1989)
A parallel program to the Argento-Bava-Soavi school, this unofficial metatextual sequel to Argento's
Suspiria (and sixth in the catch-all
Demons series) factors in post-modern self-reflexivity to keep you guessing, including the
Mater Suspiriorum source of sources (Thomas de Quincey's
Confession of an Opium Eater). Argento is name-checked and there's even some familiar Goblin cues from
Suspiria.Screenwriter Marc (Urbano Barberini) writes a treatment for the story of a witch named Lavania. He thought he made the name up. But there
was a witch by that name, and she's rising from her grave a little farther every time the word 'Lavania' is spoken. Her face and hands are grotesque pustules (ala Lamberto's first two films), but she begins to take over the mind of Marc's wife, Anne (Florence Guérin) and causes her to hallucinate guts flying out of the TV. A hot local psychic encourages Marc to change the character's name to something else, but he won't. Meanwhile, without even knowing the story he's writing, new mom Ann starts to demand to play the role, saying she "is" Lavania. How would she know? But what about sexy Caroline Munro, who starts luring Marc into the sack for the Lavania part?
Michele Soavi plays the director. I didn't even have time to mention the
undead financial backer! Confused? Join the club. Still I'd rather go on a Cozzi ride-- even if its bumpy, and dangerously near collapsing--than play it safe on some competent piece of junk like
Lost Souls or
Stigmata -hai capito?
(full review here).
ALSO-- (PS)
Cozzi's
GODZILLA Remix (1977)
NOTES:
“I urge you to look at bad films, they are so often sublime.”– Ado Kyrou
At night, around the copious cocktails, Julie hears tales of her beloved boss's odious blackmailing, rapey ways--including his outing of the trans Corrine (played by Peter Kranz). By day, Sybl Danning, young and almost unrecognizable, sunbathes. Alas, Roberto Nicolosi's trumpet-driven "Silent Way"-style languid jazz score gives it all a kind of broadside post-noir ennui which doesn't help the mood at all. Did he think it was all a sultry beachside romance instead of a soft giallo? When the suspense ratchets into gear, the music just sort of cascades over its the side in drizzles of cymbals and glistening harp swirls. No help at all! As for the suspense, you'll either pick up on the killer's identity right away or never guess, but don't worry, it's all very pretty and Vialli has a great time sinking her big German teeth into the role of the vicious older queen bee. Dexter and Rizzi are both easy on the eyes and the action is fluid throughout. It may not be the film that kickstarts a giallo marathon at your home, but it won't kill one off either. 
