The one thing that constantly surprises me is how far some people stray from where they started out.
Take Luigi Cozzi, one of those Italian directors from the Eighties who is best remembered for making Starcrash, a totally bonkers Star Wars rip off, and Contamination, a moderately bad Alien copy.
When I saw that his first film had been an adaptation of Frederik Pohl’s well-know short story, “The Tunnel Under the World,” I expected more of the same.
So it comes as a real shock to find instead a weird experimental film which makes his later films look positively exorbitant.
I suppose you really had to live back in the Seventies to really appreciate this sort of thing. It was common enough: the art house theaters were full of them.
I should note that the film itself has not survived in very good condition: although it appeared as a DVD extra with another Cozzi film, it was taken from a VHS copy. It is also a quarter hour shorter than the official run time, although there aren’t any obvious gaps.
Mind you, with a film like this, it would be hard to tell.
As you might expect, there isn’t much tying this one in to Pohl’s story. In fact, knowing the story actually helps to reduce this one to some sort of coherent narrative, although I’m not sure whether that’s what Luigi intended or not. A man gets shot again and again on “July 32” only to wake up again on the morning of the same day. Only one day he breaks the pattern and finds himself somewhere else, on another day. He walks outside the city, is pursued by murderous Santa Clauses and then has a series of strange encounters , in which he is told that everything around him is barren and desolate, only he and the other people from the city can’t see it.
He then encounters a computer that tells him it has been assigned the task of protecting the last of humanity, but is busy searching for God.
Now, had it stopped there, this might have been the first example of a virtual reality film, however, he then has other, even murkier encounters before returning to his own time.
The original story [spoiler] ends with the revelation that everyone in the city had been killed in a disaster and the characters are actually tiny robots programmed with their memories. Which seems a far more interesting revelation, and one he surely could have found some way to represent (he does fairly well finding footage to represent that computer — and with the title cards used for its words) . Instead we get a circular plot and a lot of philosophical talk that really doesn’t go anywhere.
And not much else.
Oh, well. call it an interesting footnote to an interesting era. That’s about all you can say for it.
And it definitely isn’t Starcrash.
rivets on the poster 