Film re-releases are a gift to the temporally-challenged. Those of us cursed with youth have missed countless opportunities to witness the classics on the big screen. Happily, it is becoming more common to see films given anniversary showings and, while the cynical financial motive cannot be ignored, this allows great movies to have another day in the sun. In some cases an effort is made to update the film in some way. These changes can be positive - Back to the Future's 25th anniversary remaster looks crisp and fresh - or negative - pick any post-converted 3D re-release from the past five years. And on one occasion, a beautiful, haunting and deeply atmospheric monster movie from the 1950s was re-cut with newsreel, partially re-scored with electronic music, and daubed in the gaudiest primary colours that 1977 had to offer.
Luigi Cozzi's Godzilla, hereafter referred to as Cozzilla, is a crudely coloured and re-edited version combining Ishiro Honda's original and Terry O. Morse's Americanised King of the Monsters. Cozzilla's release date reveals a curious commonality with the original film. Godzilla was heavily inspired by a re-release of King Kong in 1952 (as well as by 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), sparking a new interest in gigantic monsters bulldozing through major world capitals. Cozzilla was apparently created to cash in on the vastly inferior King Kong remake from 1976. The eerie synchronicity continues if one notes that both '70s films do grievous aesthetic and spiritual harm to two modern fables of humankind's uneasy relationship with the natural world. But this may be simple pareidolia brought on by the intense frustration of seeing a favourite film diced apart and doused in blurry colour.
Some of this vitriol may be down to the quality of the particular print available online. Despite being monochromatic, Godzilla is clear and sharp. Any extreme shadow is cleverly used to both hide flaws in the special effects and to create a stark, noirish tone around the monster's rampages. But 1977 was the year of Star Wars, and audiences (apparently) were unwilling to stomach mere shades of grey. Enter Spectorama 70, a technique used to colourise films by applying gels directly to the celluloid. Colourisation is far from new. An early example can be seen in the hand-painted colour version of A Trip to the Moon, a film over a century old. Spectorama 70 is much less precise, as might be surmised from the very notion of rubbing technicolour goo onto a film strip. The effect is one of tinting large and undefined areas of the frame one garish tone, which often gives only the impression that the viewer is peering at the movie through a sheen of urine.
The vast majority of the footage in Cozzilla comes from the two earlier versions of Godzilla and is presented in roughly the same order. There are two notable exceptions, both of which comprise fatal flaws in the movie. Genuine footage of the aftermath of aerial bombings, complete with shattered cities and broken bodies, is inserted into the opening sequence. The events of the film are explicitly stated to occur in August, linking it with the atomic destruction inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These bombings, the partial catalyst for Honda's film, are referred to only obliquely therein. Cozzilla makes careful allegory vulgar by exploiting real and graphic images in a gross attempt to add gravitas.
The second big change comes at the film's climax, and threatens to turn vulgarity into desecration. Dr. Daisuke Serizawa is the most iconic character in the original Japanese film, not least because of his chic mad scientist eyepatch. The reason that he resonates is because he represents a scientific ideal, a desire to do great work twinned with an iron resolve to do no harm. He, in a single act of self-sacrifice, saves the countless lives threatened by Godzilla and by his own potentially devastating discovery. Cozzilla decides that this poignant and tragic ending requires an additional scene of pointless bombast, and inserts footage of a naval bombardment of the creature before it succumbs. Godzilla teaches us that terror and destruction at our own hands can be defeated by the moral fortitude of a single individual. Cozzilla argues that the proper response to violent threats is a bigger and more violent reaction.
Cozzilla may hold some interest as a strange curiosity, but lacks almost all of the depth of either of its predecessors. The American cut made strides to bring the story to a new audience while maintaining the same spirit. The Italian effort dilutes and obscures, losing its way in a rainbow haze. To make a bad film is regrettable. To mangle a classic is something worse.
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