klu9Going through my free streaming bookmarks, I thought I'd watch The One-Armed Swordsman (1967, Chang Cheh).
But when I click "Watch for free"... I get a one-eyed samurai!
Looking at Tubi, I see they have a Japanese film called Tange Sazen: One Armed Swordsman: The Ghosts of the Past, which might be what Plex is showing. Except the run time is half an hour longer
https://tubitv.com/es-mx/movies/100047858/one-armed-swordsman-the-ghosts-of-the-past
PlayTorrio has 117 minute version (same runtime as listed on Wikipedia) but none of the 4 options for subtitles in English are properly synced :(
Oh well, I'll watch FantastiCozzi instead, documentary about the #BMovie director Luigi Cozzi beloved of #Monsterdon for films like Starcrash & Hercules and beloathed of #MonsterMiru for inserting real footage of dead people into his 1977 cut of Godzilla
https://flixhouse.com/video/5793/fantasticozzi
[START OF LONG THREAD ON COZZI FILMS]
For those who watched The Adventures of Hercules in #Monsterdon , Urania is not only the name of the muse of astronomy & astrology in Greek mythology, but also the popular Italian sci-fi magazine that Luigi Cozzi grew up reading.
Cozzi got his start with a Kodak Brownie camera, writing pieces for scifi magazines around the world & attending the Trieste International Science Fiction Film Festival, which awarded #Monsterdon "favourite" X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes its 'Silver Spaceship' trophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trieste_Science%2BFiction_Festival
Cozzi's 1st film at 21 y.o. was an experimental low-budget adaptation of a "Truman-Show-esque" Frederik Pohl story. To fund it, he & his friend Alfredo Castelli would sell story ideas for the comic Diabolik & use each payment to buy more film stock
He purposely made it confusing because he knew critics would be afraid to write negative reviews of something they didn't understand :D
But it caught Dario Argento's eye...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_Under_the_World_(film)
Cozzi & Argento's 1st collaboration was a "giallo" mystery/horror/thriller inspired by a Perry Mason book & is free to watch on Plex & Mometu (in some countries)
https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/movie/four-flies-on-grey-velvet
https://watch.mometu.com/feature/four-flies-grey-velvet
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/four-flies-on-grey-velvet
#LuigiCozzi #SciFi #Monsterdon #Giallo #PerryMason #LegitFreeMovies
Cozzi's 1st commercially-made film was an "extended remake" of a giallo episode he made for TV, & is also available legit free streaming (in some countries), under various titles (as it was banned for violence when originally produced, so re-edited & re-titled)
The Killer Must Kill Again / The Dark is Death's Friend
https://tubitv.com/es-mx/movies/12018/the-dark-is-death-s-friend
https://fawesome.tv/movies/10537613/killer-must-kill-again
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-killer-must-kill-again
After 2 directing efforts, Cozzi started working in a film distribution company, buying rights to release colourized & dubbed versions of old scifi films/Monsterdon-bait like:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
The Day of the Triffids (1963)
The Thing From Another World (1951)
Invaders From Mars (1953)
and of course:
Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) (US-ified version with Raymond Burr)
Cozzi's boss refused to distribute Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in black & white, so Cozzi decided to colourize it & pump up the volume with "Sensurround" explosions, as well as extend it with real footage from Hiroshima etc. He seems very pleased with the results but I think this is where he & #Monsterdon / #MonsterMiru strongly diverge.
The documentary FantastiCozzi doesn't address the issue of real dead people in the footage.
In 1976, Cozzi directed a romance "The Last Concert"
1. Big hit in Italy & Japan
2. Still wanting to do scifi, he used his own money from that to make a scifi special FX reel to shop to producers
3. Got turned down by producers, uninterested in a scifi project
4. 15 days later, Star Wars came out & became a gigantic hit
5. Surprise, surprise, producers called him back real interested! 😆
[See alt text for more]
Caroline Munro was Cozzi's 1st choice for the lead in Starcrash after seeing her in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)(now taking bets on that as next Monsterdon poll option 😜)
The producers didn't know her, decided to get a US star. As shooting approached, they still hadn't got the money for a big star & went with Cozzi's 1st choice.
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-golden-voyage-of-sinbad
Marjoe Gortner was cast in Starcrash because Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures (see previously on Monsterdon ad nauseam) had picked up distribution rights & had just had a hit with Gortner in The Food of the Gods (Monsterdon, 28 Sep 2025. Sequel shown in #MonsterMiru same date)
David Hasselhoff was an unknown, one of several soap opera actors on tapes sent to Cozzi by a casting agency
Cozzi inserted references/homage to lots of scifi/Monsterdon films & scifi books, inc:
Forbidden Planet (1954)
Invaders from Mars
Jason and the Argonauts (#Monsterdon 15 March 2026!)
2001 (1968)
#LuigiCozzi #SciFi #Monsterdon #Starcrash #ForbiddenPlanet #JasonAndTheArgonauts
Caroline Munro was then married to former surf rocker Judd Hamilton, who also was her manager. After dinner w/ the producers, he was cast as the robot
Seems Judd got jealous of the vibe growing between Caroline & the Hoff & came up with artistic reasons why the two shouldn't have a final kiss in the film
Judd released singles on Arkoff's record label & co-produced the slasher Maniac (1980) with Joe Spinell, Count Zarth Arn in Starcrash
Every day, Star Wars' box office take was climbing & every day the Starcrash producers kept hassling Cozzi "Is this gonna be like Star Wars?" "Is this gonna be like Star Wars?"
So yes, he inserted plenty of Star Wars-isms to keep the producers happy
Cozzi says that the pseudonym "Lewis Coates" was NOT to appeal to foreign markets but the Italian one. Apparently Italian audiences preferred the idea of foreign-made Westerns etc, so Italian directors & actors using Anglo sounding names was an already developed tradition in the Italian movie business
For some reason, on Plex he is listed as NEITHER Luigi Cozzi NOR Lewis Coates but as "Luigi Collo"
After initially signing up & having Marjoe Gortner cast, American International declined to release Starcrash when they saw the final cut. American International!!!
Roger Corman's New World picked it up & Starcrash became their biggest US box office to date.
On his way back from the Dominican Republic (where he helped out with rewrites for an Italian Blue Lagoon rip-off), Cozzi & his producer saw Alien in NYC & decided to make their own "homage". To save money, set on Earth (decades before Alien:Earth)
Known as Alien Contamination, Contamination, Toxic Spawn, Larvae
https://flixhouse.com/video/2450/contamination
https://watch.plex.tv/en-GB/movie/contamination
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/alien-contamination
Cannon wanted to talk to Cozzi re Space Vampires (later, Lifeforce by Tobe Hooper) & met in Rome while Ferrigno was making 7 Magnificent Gladiators (#MonsterMiru 1 March) for them
Lou's Cannon deal required a #Hercules film cuz he wanted to be the new Steve Reeves. Golan was so upset w/ the Herc script he got, he asked Cozzi if he could give him a new story by 7AM the next day! 😱 Cozzi basically pitched "Superman of the past" & got the job
Mission accomplished?
7 Magnificent Gladiators was so bad, Cannon hired Cozzi & brought back Lou to shoot some new scenes to fix it. Then they decided to double the time & make a whole new film, Adventures of Hercules... but without telling Lou that they were making a new film because they were only paying him a lower rate for 7MG reshoots.
To be clear: they shot a movie without telling the star they were making it!!! :D
That's also why the final battle in The Adventures of Hercules is in fact a rotoscoped fight scene from the first Herc film, because Lou had already finished his allotted time for the "7 Magnificent Gladiators reshoots" & gone home.
Cozzi reunited with Christopher Plummer for Nosferatu in Venice, with main star Klaus Kinski chewing his way thru at least 5 directors before shooting completed. Indeed Kinski took over as director of his own scenes, requiring Cozzi to come shoot him walking aimlessly around Venice every dawn for 2 months
Cozzi then helmed a film w/ Donald Pleasance where a female rock band record a lost Paganini score, thus resurrecting the composer from the dead!
In 1989 Cozzi was again hired by Cannon to fix & reshoot an unreleased/unreleasable Lou Ferrigno movie, Sinbad of the Seven Seas. (Lou didn't get conned into making a whole new film this time!)
Presumably this will be the next film Monsterdonians vote for after Golden Voyage of Sinbad 😆
Also in 1989, Cozzi reunited with Caroline Munro (after failing to convince producers to cast her in Contamination & Hercules) for De Profundis, a meta horror inspired by Dario Argento's Suspiria & Inferno. The US distributors called him up & said "We have the rights to the name Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat" & told him to just throw in a scene with a black cat to justify the new title!
At he same time, Cozzi was FX supervisor on a Dario Argento film with Harvey Keitel called... The Black Cat. Dario was a little perturbed when "The Black Cat by Luigi Cozzi" was announced!
Dario's Black Cat became a segment in the anthology film Two Evil Eyes
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/two-evil-eyes
Dario didn't hold it against Luigi, and they even opened together a horror/scifi bookshop/publisher in Rome called Profondo Rosso (after Dario's 1975 horror of that name).
Cozzi didn't direct a feature film for 27 years until he made "Blood on Méliès Moon" in 2016 (an homage to a century of his favourite scifi films, partly filmed in the Profondo Rosso shop), & 3 more since
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0172826/
https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=Luigi%20Cozzi&person_id=113446
Thus endeth my semi-live (stop motion?) tooting on FantastiCozzi (2016), documentary abou scifi director Luigi Cozzi.
Interesting, but would have been more so if they'd also interviewed people other than him (Argento, actors, producers etc) & presented some critical views too