There are a couple of remarks by Luigi Cozzi (I think) that I mention in my thesis, which I could remember well enough to paraphrase, but cannot remember their sources.
First, Cozzi remarking that a difference between Bava and Argento's films was that Bava's tended not to play in the first-run circuit (except maybe very briefly) whereas Argento's did.
Second, Cozzi remarking that in Italy producers did not want to know what a film was about, but what films it was like.
Thanks in advance
Showing posts with label Luigi Cozzi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luigi Cozzi. Show all posts
Monday, 10 December 2012
Monday, 14 December 2009
Contamination - Alien arriva sulla terra / Contamination / Alien Contamination
While not one of Luigi Cozzi's better films, Contamination rarely fails as far as entertainment is concerned, not least on account of being an opportunistic cross between Zombie and Alien.
The opening sequences recall Fulci's film, but clearly aspire to be bigger and better on every level: Rather than a boat, we have a bona fide ship heading up the New York coastline. Rather than two cops going on board, we have a four man team. And, rather than finding evidence of one or two deaths, they uncover a score or so of bodies – the entire crew of the Caribbean Lady.
The cause of these deaths, however, is less obviously threatening than Zombie's flesh eater, instead looking like a “giant squash, avocado or mango,” albeit one that pulses with light and emits a curious whining sound.
But it soon proves just as deadly as one of the men ignores advice and picks it up.
The thing reveals itself as an alien egg as it explodes and covers three of the men in goo. Seconds later they explode – in messy slow motion...
It's a fairly crappy effect, but one that has a certain shameless charm to it. And, besides, you're going to be seeing a lot more of it, and the eggs themselves, as the plot unfolds.
Having escaped, the sole survivor, Lieutenant Aris (Marino Mase) is placed in quarantine and decontaminated. He's then visited by Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), a government agent, who is first interested in what he has to say for himself and then understandably concerned.
They go to the company responsible for importing the eggs – purportedly a consignment of coffee – into the city and there discover a warehouse full of zombie-like men who explode when shot. (Amongst them is Martin Sorrentino, the sceptical detective in City of the Living Dead etc.)
Prior to pursuing the eggs to their Caribbean plantation source, Colonel Holmes decides to call upon alcoholic ex-astronaut Commander Ian Hubbard (Ian McCulloch, further reinforcing the Zombie connection now that we've moved in a more Alien direction).
Holmes had previously dismissed his stories of alien eggs on Mars and the death of his colleague – let's call him Kane, since that's his role – as rubbish, but is no longer so sure.
Having recruited an initially reluctant Hubbard to the team, Holmes and her men head for the source of the eggs and all the trouble.
Eventually they discover in encounter the Alien Cyclops, a monster important enough to have its own billing in the credits and clearly the place where a considerable proportion of the overall budget went.
Who will triumph? Is humanity doomed?
Though once on the banned list in the UK, Contamination is really a pretty innocuous film. While there's a fair bit of gore – albeit only enough to warrant a 15 certificate on the film's UK re-release, rather than the 18 given Alien and Zombie – it is hardly mean spirited or laden with dubious psychosexual subtexts.
Luigi Cozzi simply isn't that sort of filmmaker, the atypical The Killer Must Kill Again somewhat excepted. Rather, he's just someone who likes his science fiction and his monsters and would do whatever he could to bring them to the screen.
And there's the rub: His direction isn't too bad all things considered, but as usual he suffers from a lack of budget and quality collaborators that prevent him from realising the vision that was probably in his head.
The exceptions are Goblin, who provide the score, portions of which were later recycled in Hell of the Living Dead.
The opening sequences recall Fulci's film, but clearly aspire to be bigger and better on every level: Rather than a boat, we have a bona fide ship heading up the New York coastline. Rather than two cops going on board, we have a four man team. And, rather than finding evidence of one or two deaths, they uncover a score or so of bodies – the entire crew of the Caribbean Lady.
The cause of these deaths, however, is less obviously threatening than Zombie's flesh eater, instead looking like a “giant squash, avocado or mango,” albeit one that pulses with light and emits a curious whining sound.
But it soon proves just as deadly as one of the men ignores advice and picks it up.
The thing reveals itself as an alien egg as it explodes and covers three of the men in goo. Seconds later they explode – in messy slow motion...
It's a fairly crappy effect, but one that has a certain shameless charm to it. And, besides, you're going to be seeing a lot more of it, and the eggs themselves, as the plot unfolds.
Having escaped, the sole survivor, Lieutenant Aris (Marino Mase) is placed in quarantine and decontaminated. He's then visited by Colonel Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), a government agent, who is first interested in what he has to say for himself and then understandably concerned.
They go to the company responsible for importing the eggs – purportedly a consignment of coffee – into the city and there discover a warehouse full of zombie-like men who explode when shot. (Amongst them is Martin Sorrentino, the sceptical detective in City of the Living Dead etc.)
Prior to pursuing the eggs to their Caribbean plantation source, Colonel Holmes decides to call upon alcoholic ex-astronaut Commander Ian Hubbard (Ian McCulloch, further reinforcing the Zombie connection now that we've moved in a more Alien direction).
Holmes had previously dismissed his stories of alien eggs on Mars and the death of his colleague – let's call him Kane, since that's his role – as rubbish, but is no longer so sure.
Having recruited an initially reluctant Hubbard to the team, Holmes and her men head for the source of the eggs and all the trouble.
Eventually they discover in encounter the Alien Cyclops, a monster important enough to have its own billing in the credits and clearly the place where a considerable proportion of the overall budget went.
Who will triumph? Is humanity doomed?
Though once on the banned list in the UK, Contamination is really a pretty innocuous film. While there's a fair bit of gore – albeit only enough to warrant a 15 certificate on the film's UK re-release, rather than the 18 given Alien and Zombie – it is hardly mean spirited or laden with dubious psychosexual subtexts.
Luigi Cozzi simply isn't that sort of filmmaker, the atypical The Killer Must Kill Again somewhat excepted. Rather, he's just someone who likes his science fiction and his monsters and would do whatever he could to bring them to the screen.
And there's the rub: His direction isn't too bad all things considered, but as usual he suffers from a lack of budget and quality collaborators that prevent him from realising the vision that was probably in his head.
The exceptions are Goblin, who provide the score, portions of which were later recycled in Hell of the Living Dead.
Thursday, 28 December 2006
The Killer Must Kill Again
Philandering playboy Mainardi (George Hilton) has a problem: how can he be rid of wife Nora (Teresa Valasquez) whilst holding onto her family's fortune.
The film's title sequence evokes its original Web of the Spider name; a web in which all involved are ultimately to become fatally ensnared.
Divorce, Italian style is the answer, when Mainardi happens upon a black-clad assassin (Antoine St John) in the act of disposing of a victim and makes him an offer that cannot be refused. If the killer will take care of Nora, making it look like a kidnapping, he can collect $20,000. If not then Mainardi will go to the authorities.
Would you trust someone you had just witnessed disposing of a body to successfully pull of a hit without complications?
The killer accepts and the deed is soon done. But as he returns to the apartment to tidy up fate intervenes. A young couple, Luca and Laura (Alessio Orano and Cristina Galbo) notice the keys in the ignition of his car and drive off.
Thinking fast, the killer hotwires a car and sets off in pursuit, eventually catching up with his quarry – still oblivious to the body in the boot – at an isolated beach-front villa. (Note the similarities here with Cozzi's Door into Darkness episode.)
In the meantime, the car's theft has led Mainardi's neighbours to call the police. Thus he turns home, alibi at the ready, to unxpectedly find a detective waiting with some awkward questions...
Luigi Cozzi presents something of an enigma: how can someone so knowledgeable and so honest in his love for cinema make such bad films as Contamination and Starcrash. On the evidence of The Killer Must Kill Again, one answer is that he was unfortunate to see the fantasy cinema increasingly dominated by big budgets and expensive effects.
For this giallo – completed in 1973 but shelved until 1973, and thereby perhaps missing out on the opportunity to have the boom-period impact it should have – is propelled first and foremost by ideas.
The central one, the challenge that Cozzi has set himself, is whether he can make a giallo – and note here the recurrence of the filone colour – that has no mystery element to it and correspondingly eschews key devices like subjective shots from an unseen killer's perspective, in favour of a transparently obvious narrative, yet still engage the spectator and keep them in suspense.
The Yellow Wallpaper, perhaps
Yellow...
... yellow ...
... everywhere; and a nice nod to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage besides
The answer, felicitously, is a resounding “yes” for a film that could well be understood as the giallo equivalent of Edgar G. Ulmer's noir masterpiece Detour, with which it shares the same perverse Murphy's Law logic and serves as similar object lesson in how to make the most of the resources at one's disposal.
In general Cozzi emerges as classicist to his mentor's modernist, exhibiting a preference for techniques dating back not only to Hitchcock – and here we can note the neatness of the killer's lighter with the initials DA as intertextually referencing Dario Argento via Strangers on a Train, along with a coincidental version of the inverted signifying chain some have detected in that film's Bruno Anthony character's initials against those of Guy Haines – but also D W Griffith, using irising and, above all, cross-cutting to enhance mood and embellish tension.
Initials DA rather than BA or GH
Another strange mannequin-type figure on the right
One moment that stands out in particular in this regard is the director's juxtapositon of rape and sex scenes in a way that makes it all but impossible for the (male) spectator to take pleasure in the latter. (Men are pigs, yeah...) Half-intended it may be, in that the previously unmentioned Femi Benussi is deployed strictly as get naked and die material – Strip Nude for Your Killer, indeed – but it nevertheless raises questions for those who would dismiss a film like this or a filmmaker like Cozzi as beneath them.
It is also about the performances that Cozzi draws from his leads; and here he is perhaps even in advance of his mentor, whose bad experiences with Tony Musante's method antics famously soured himself against the acting profession for many years. Or, perhaps – seeing as Hilton plays the same suave, sophisticated and shifty type he always does in these films and that St John probably could not but be menacing thanks to that distinctive cadaverous, haunted physiognomy – that it is simply a case of Cozzi knowing when he was onto a good thing and consciously not getting in the way.
In terms of my ongoing Cozzi as key Gothic influence on Argento thesis, meanwhile, two things are worth noting. First, the killer carrying out Nora Mainardi's corpse Dracula style. Second, the coincidental mirroring between Mainardi's opting for a killer whose finding in flagrante delicto implies a lack of professionalism – compounded by the viewer's awareness of his psychopathic tendencies – and Baron Frankenstein's use of asylum-patient material that would not have passed muster earlier in his career in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. In both films, that is, the plot point grants a certain inevitability to the failure of the protagonists' best laid plans.
The Bride of the Monster?
Mondo Macabro's impressive DVD of the film describes it as “a lost giallo classic”. They are not wrong.
The film's title sequence evokes its original Web of the Spider name; a web in which all involved are ultimately to become fatally ensnared.
Divorce, Italian style is the answer, when Mainardi happens upon a black-clad assassin (Antoine St John) in the act of disposing of a victim and makes him an offer that cannot be refused. If the killer will take care of Nora, making it look like a kidnapping, he can collect $20,000. If not then Mainardi will go to the authorities.
Would you trust someone you had just witnessed disposing of a body to successfully pull of a hit without complications?
The killer accepts and the deed is soon done. But as he returns to the apartment to tidy up fate intervenes. A young couple, Luca and Laura (Alessio Orano and Cristina Galbo) notice the keys in the ignition of his car and drive off.
Thinking fast, the killer hotwires a car and sets off in pursuit, eventually catching up with his quarry – still oblivious to the body in the boot – at an isolated beach-front villa. (Note the similarities here with Cozzi's Door into Darkness episode.)
In the meantime, the car's theft has led Mainardi's neighbours to call the police. Thus he turns home, alibi at the ready, to unxpectedly find a detective waiting with some awkward questions...
Luigi Cozzi presents something of an enigma: how can someone so knowledgeable and so honest in his love for cinema make such bad films as Contamination and Starcrash. On the evidence of The Killer Must Kill Again, one answer is that he was unfortunate to see the fantasy cinema increasingly dominated by big budgets and expensive effects.
For this giallo – completed in 1973 but shelved until 1973, and thereby perhaps missing out on the opportunity to have the boom-period impact it should have – is propelled first and foremost by ideas.
The central one, the challenge that Cozzi has set himself, is whether he can make a giallo – and note here the recurrence of the filone colour – that has no mystery element to it and correspondingly eschews key devices like subjective shots from an unseen killer's perspective, in favour of a transparently obvious narrative, yet still engage the spectator and keep them in suspense.
The Yellow Wallpaper, perhaps
Yellow...
... yellow ...
... everywhere; and a nice nod to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage besides
The answer, felicitously, is a resounding “yes” for a film that could well be understood as the giallo equivalent of Edgar G. Ulmer's noir masterpiece Detour, with which it shares the same perverse Murphy's Law logic and serves as similar object lesson in how to make the most of the resources at one's disposal.
In general Cozzi emerges as classicist to his mentor's modernist, exhibiting a preference for techniques dating back not only to Hitchcock – and here we can note the neatness of the killer's lighter with the initials DA as intertextually referencing Dario Argento via Strangers on a Train, along with a coincidental version of the inverted signifying chain some have detected in that film's Bruno Anthony character's initials against those of Guy Haines – but also D W Griffith, using irising and, above all, cross-cutting to enhance mood and embellish tension.
Initials DA rather than BA or GH
Another strange mannequin-type figure on the right
One moment that stands out in particular in this regard is the director's juxtapositon of rape and sex scenes in a way that makes it all but impossible for the (male) spectator to take pleasure in the latter. (Men are pigs, yeah...) Half-intended it may be, in that the previously unmentioned Femi Benussi is deployed strictly as get naked and die material – Strip Nude for Your Killer, indeed – but it nevertheless raises questions for those who would dismiss a film like this or a filmmaker like Cozzi as beneath them.
It is also about the performances that Cozzi draws from his leads; and here he is perhaps even in advance of his mentor, whose bad experiences with Tony Musante's method antics famously soured himself against the acting profession for many years. Or, perhaps – seeing as Hilton plays the same suave, sophisticated and shifty type he always does in these films and that St John probably could not but be menacing thanks to that distinctive cadaverous, haunted physiognomy – that it is simply a case of Cozzi knowing when he was onto a good thing and consciously not getting in the way.
In terms of my ongoing Cozzi as key Gothic influence on Argento thesis, meanwhile, two things are worth noting. First, the killer carrying out Nora Mainardi's corpse Dracula style. Second, the coincidental mirroring between Mainardi's opting for a killer whose finding in flagrante delicto implies a lack of professionalism – compounded by the viewer's awareness of his psychopathic tendencies – and Baron Frankenstein's use of asylum-patient material that would not have passed muster earlier in his career in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. In both films, that is, the plot point grants a certain inevitability to the failure of the protagonists' best laid plans.
The Bride of the Monster?
Mondo Macabro's impressive DVD of the film describes it as “a lost giallo classic”. They are not wrong.
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