Blood on Melies' Moon

       Luigi Cozzi in the basement of the store he manages, Profondo Rosso              

I ran across Luigi's Cozzi's Blood on Méliès' Moon on Tubi and, expecting little, was pleasantly surprised. The 2016 film is also available on a handsome disc by the fine people at Severin Films. By any reasonable set of standards, Blood... is a piss poor film, shoddily written, clumsily staged and ineptly acted. A home movie with CGI asides. Slipshod direction has been Cozzi's trademark for over five decades, so I was prepared for a complete debacle. His directing credits include such dreck as the Lou Ferrigno starring Hercules and the Star Wars rip-off Starcrash. Nevertheless, the 'amat' in amateur means love and the love Cozzi has for films and film history permeates Blood on Méliès' Moon even when its display of film craft would embarrass a neophyte. Cozzi's quest in the film is noble and heroic even if it resembles that of Don Quixote rather than Galahad.

Besides the goofy directing credits Cozzi has amassed, he was a frequent collaborator of Dario Argento. I joked in an earlier column that I was an acolyte in the cults of various auteurs, but Cozzi really does live his life devotedly promoting the work of the giallomeister. A quick comparison of Cozzi's work to Argento's displays the latter's superiority. Argento's camera placement and use of color put him in another league compared to a camp follower like Cozzi. Cozzi is well aware of this, though, and has kept the flame of his comrade's work alive through documentaries and books. He even runs a horror film gift shop in Rome, a gialloreia if you will, called Profondo Rosso after the Argento film. The shop has a basement in which all sorts of Argento related bric-a-brac  is on display for ravenous horror fans. Inevitably, the basement becomes the setting for a series of gory murders in Blood on Méliès' Moon.

The film has a ridiculous plot, but if you are watching this flick for the plot you will be unrewarded. Anyhow, a seance gone wrong unleashes a soulless killer in Rome and all humanity is threatened. The bearish Cozzi must retrieve a lost Méliès film to avert doom. Makes sense to me! Throughout, Cozzi expresses the joy he finds in physical media. VHS cassettes and book jackets make shout outs to everyone from Philip K. Dick to Dostoyevsky. Cozzi also interweaves footage from a host of films, including his own, into the mix along with cheerfully primitive CGI effects. As he searches for his grail, he meets up with a friendly cohort of film veterans. He visits a special effects studio, a practical effects studio, and has a yummy looking dinner with Mario Bava's son, Lamberto. All this would smack of self-indulgence were it not for Cozzi's sense of self-abnegation. At one point, Cozzi awakens his long suffering wife to recount his latest nightmare: that he has been acclaimed, or is it declaimed, as the Italian Ed Wood. Well, he rationalizes, at least Ed Wood is famous.

Blood on Méliès' Moon is a tatterdemalion film and an affecting mash note to the cinema.