FantastiCozzi is a fun, breezy documentary on Italian genre filmmaker Luigi Cozzi. At first, the camera finds him behind the counter of his video store where he relates his story in his own words. Luigi starts out as a little kid obsessed with science fiction and grows up and becomes the Italian correspondent for Famous Monsters of Filmland. He then begins writing movie reviews and strikes up a friendship with none other than Dario Argento, who asks him to co-write Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Eventually, Cozzi shifts to directing gialli (The Killer Must Kill Again), sex comedies (The Naked Housekeeper), and even his own Italian version of Godzilla. Other films featured are his cheesy Star Wars knock-off, Starcrash, his Alien clone, Contamination, and my personal Cozzi favorite, Hercules.
Director Felipe M. (Deodato Holocaust) Guerra uses a couple different source interviews with Cozzi to generate the film. In all of them, Luigi seems like a gregarious guy and is obviously a natural storyteller. Guerra also gives us a nice assortment of clips of the films, and even some behind-the-scenes footage. Although I wish the film delved more into Cozzi’s Godzilla (it would probably make for its own illuminating documentary), the stuff we do get is fascinating. The scenes of the colorization process of Godzilla are especially mind-blowing as artists are shown hand painting the black and white film a frame at a time.
Most of the time is devoted to Starcrash, which is fine. The behind the scenes look at the special effects are a lot of fun and the side-by-side comparison of Star Wars and Starcrash (accompanied by Meco’s Star Wars disco theme!) is particularly great. I also enjoyed scenes from the vintage documentary on Contamination where Cozzi reveals the alien eggs are nothing more than balloons painted green and touched up with slime. The best tidbit however was learning that when they made Hercules, no one told Lou Ferrigno they were making a sequel simultaneously. He thought they were just doing reshoots of another movie! The producers purposefully kept him in the dark because if he knew he was making Herc 2, he would’ve asked for more money! Incredible!
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