Caligula (1981)

One of my all time favorites.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

A couple years ago I got a Roger Ebert review book and discovered his 0 star review of it. In it, he writes: "You have heard that this is a violent film. But who could have suspected how violent, and to what vile purpose, it really is? In this film, there are scenes depicting a man whose urinary tract is closed, and who has gallons of wine poured down his throat. His bursting stomach is punctured with a sword. There is a scene in which a man is emasculated, and his genitals thrown to dogs, who eagerly eat them on the screen. There are scenes of decapitation, evisceration, rape, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia." Yes, these scenes do occur, and they are disgusting.However, there are misnomers here. The emasculation is off screen. The dogs do not EAT the genitals, they just lick the blood off. The "necrophilia" is not sex with a corpse. Caligula's wife dies in his arms and he passionately kisses her in absolute grief. So according to Ebert, kissing your dead spouse goodbye makes you a necrophiliac! And the bestiality, while it's still perverted, Caligula goes to bed with an animal, but no further sexual content occurs.As for the other scenes, yeah, there's not much to say to defend them, They are perverted and exemplify the worst of human nature. But maybe that is the point. I thought a movie like this was praising the emperor, the way people cheer and rile you up for Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. But it doesn't seem to. I felt bad when Belfort was arrested. Yet I was satisfied when Caligula got beheaded.Now I should mention that by no means am I defending this despicable content. It is a nasty movie. There are few I could recommend it to.I am also not sure if it IS a 10. But no other rating on any scale seems to fit. I gave it a 10 and put it on my favorites list. But it's not a pure delight. Some scenes made me cringe or fast forward(like a 2 minute lesbian sex scene) but I can't give this another rating.My 10 is not a literal 10. It's more of a "not applicable." Like, I said, there is no rating I could give it. I am left with a film I enjoyed and yet despised. It's one of the best I have ever seen but at the same time it deserves bottom 10 status. If you really want to see this, please do. If you can't bring yourself to do it, that is okay to do.If you read my review of Triumph of the Will, you know I thought it was not good but rather important, Perhaps that, in summary, is why I give it a 10."A haughty spirit comes before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). This is the story of a sexually perverted ruler's fall. Maybe that is where the majesty lands.

Foremost this movie is an old memory as my parents rented it on a Betamax tape in 1984 to watch it with my grandparents during a Saturday night ! As it was very unusual for my brother and I to go to bed like this, i think we asked them the day after how was the movie and they got really upset and don't want to talk about it ! For sure i recorded the data for later and as an adult, it was a duty to look for it ! Honestly it's very hardcore, graphic and i can't fathom my parents watching it with their family as as this time in France no porn movies were aired to the TV ! The great idea of Guccione was to sell it as a Peplum and not like an adult movie ! For a naive audience (like my family), they see a cover with a roman coin so it's very innocent ! This movie is such a classic that every antiquity hot scene looks like it ! The girls, and especially Anneka, are beautiful and are really skilled experts : all the sexual combination are done and it's totally exciting (especially the lesbian, orgy scenes)! I don't know if it's the most expensive porn movie ever but at least, the production is sumptuous and the sets looks like the best Hollywood movies (and have also some big names in it!). For me, it's thus a really must see movie !

Early this morning I started watching one of the most notorious cult films ever made, Caligula (1979). The full uncut version is available on YouTube (without an 18 and over warning! Kids, do NOT watch this! Seriously!!!). I saw the first half hour of it, tried to go to sleep afterward, and I couldn't (it disturbed me that much). Then I finally went to sleep and resumed the rest of the film when I woke up. It is disturbingly pornographic and violent, and shows the basest of human nature. The back story behind the film is even more interesting than the film itself since it had a lot of big names and blurred the line between mainstream and adult. The 70s were a time of experimentation, but this went way beyond that and it is truly decadent and over the top, showing the licentiousness and depravity of Imperial Rome. There are gruesome things in it that will turn your stomach and wall to wall sex that was thrown in without the actors' knowledge after principal photography was completed. So many of the people involved disavowed this film because it devolved into a different kind of animal than what the screenwriter (Gore Vidal, of all people) envisioned. It's like a car wreck, so horrible, but at the same time, you can't help but crane your neck to look at it. It was done with a lot of style, impressive sets and costumes, and even had a bit of dark humor. It is a fascinating yet bizarre and shocking picture, one of the darkest I've ever seen, despite it being a big uneven mess. The only good people in the film get killed off and the rest are so corrupt and evil. However, you have to consider the time it was made and the time period that it depicts. In a way I have to admire the balls of the filmmakers. Very few filmmakers today take those kinds of risks, to shatter taboos, and dare to show the ugliness of humanity. It is mainly cult filmmakers that make midnight movies such as these that do.I draw the line at this film. It's one of those that you see once and once is enough. The only other one I can think of that goes beyond this is Salo, and I am definitely not brave enough for that one!

When a glorified pimp steals control of a masterpiece, and when the moral compasses of all involves withers away, then worlds of cinemas collapse. Logical, no? Once, several years before Star Wars, Gore Vidal wrote a screenplay about possibly the most depraved Roman emperor of Ancient times. It's probably safe to say that his mistake was in asking a porn magazine to fund this movie's production. Throw in the involvement of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione and you have Caligula, one of the most notorious failures of 70s cinema. While it's not quite as vicious as Cannibal Holocaust, it's still excessively exploitative; while Holocaust used real killings, Caligula used real sex - so as to try to boost sales of Penthouse magazine, apparently. So what grabbed my attention for this film so strongly, especially when I initially thought it'd give me nightmares? I mean it's not like it's entirely historically accurate, is it? Well... it's got Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, among others. And the musical score is recognisable, at least among classical music aficionados.Well, I took one for the team when I went to pick up a copy of the Imperial Edition DVD set. This included the uncut release... which SHOULD warrant an R18 where I live but somehow doesn't... the 1999 "Rated Version", misrepresented as the "Theatrical Version"... and there's the one I chanced at, the Alternative "Pre-Release" Edition, a new edit created from an earlier cut which re-arranges a few scenes back into their original context, and most of the explicit sexual inserts added by Guccione are removed, filled in by a handful of 16mm behind-the-scenes footage. So, fair enough, it's not so much of a sex film as it was before. But not even that could save Caligula from being one of the most miserable films I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing.From start to finish this turkey blows (in more ways than one!), and it's not hard to see why: you have three conflicting artistic differences duking it out, and while sometimes it works, it can't really be excused that sometimes you can forget you're watching a film with explicit sex, and then a helping of genitalia brings you back to earth with an unpleasant thump. Not to mention the violence, as well - in one early scene, a soldier has several gallons of wine poured down his gullet, and Tiberius personally pokes a hole in him... just to prove to us that neither the Ancient Romans nor the Modern Writers have limits when it comes to pointless and senseless violence. Still... I guess it's fair game if, historically, Tiberius ordered to have the scales of a fish rub off a victim's face...And as for the explicit porn - how did this get into public cinemas again? It's clear proof that Bob was a sex tycoon who sneaked back onto the set to film a hardcore porno movie for which - though as I recall, most of the acts are legal - the authorities could shut down the set and sentence everyone to jail. It almost happened anyway - in several theatres the movie was shut down and seized by police! I'm just saying that this is the sort of thing that doesn't bear watching if you aren't in the mood. I'm not going to say anything about them, for obvious reasons. Even if I did, perhaps my arguments would be invalid - except for the fact that they replaced some of the more important scenes.This excessive sex and violence aside, the point is this: Caligula in general is a major dud - a long, drawn-out (seriously it drags on well over two hours!!) piece of work of which not one bit is historically accurate, nor assembled in a historically accurate order. If Bob was holding out for artistic freedom, then he'd failed in that respect because really, even ART has standards! Of course, it's not all bad news... Malcolm, Helen, Peter, John and co. did a fairly good job in their acting, and the music, like I said, is a splendid compilation to listen to. The sets aren't bad either, even if they do represent a nightmarish version of Ancient Rome. Also on the Imperial Edition DVD, there are a few deleted scenes which SHOULD have stayed in the film, as they surely would make it less of a disgrace than it is now. A complete and detailed history of the production of the film is also being written by James Ellis Chaffin and Ranjit Sandhu, with research from Thomas Ryerson, called 200 Degrees of Failure: The Unmaking of Caligula, slated for a release sometime this year, or possibly the next. You can find a lot of their research at their site (caligula.ws). I'm sure that the story behind how Gore Vidal's work fell apart would be a much interesting read, and I'm looking forward to it.