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In the mid-1970s, Luigi Cozzi decided to bring GODZILLA back to Italian theaters. But he didn’t simply re-release GODZILLA IL RE DEI MOSTRI; Cozzi instead took the U.S. version of the film, which itself was already cut apart and re-spliced together from the Japanese original, and added his own “new” footage… mostly comprised of old newsreels showing wartime footage of real death and destruction. He also extensively reworked the audio and music tracks for “Futursound”, an 8 track magnetic sound system based on Universal Pictures’ Sensurround. Most notably, Cozzi also colorized GODZILLA using a technique involving colored gels that created a nightmarish, glowing effect far different from the pastel colorization attempts employed by Ted Turner in the 1980s or the digital technology now used by Sony Pictures and other studios. The finished result— released in Italy in 1977 as GODZILLA, but often referred to by fans and the director himself as “COZZILLA”— stands as a real oddity in the long and often bizarre history of the Godzilla franchise. The film is worth a look just out of pure curiosity value alone.
