Caligula (1980)

This violent and explicit $17 million take on Rome’s most depraved emperor – produced by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione from an original screenplay by novelist Gore Vidal – is one of cinema’s legendary disasters.

Even before the film was completed, several of the distinguished names involved in the production were falling over each other to disown it.

When the film was ultimately shown to the critics, the clamouring increased tenfold, with leading participants reiterating their contentions that, if they had known the movie was going to turn out this way, they never would have had anything to do with it in the first place.

Neither Gore Vidal nor director Tinto Brass allowed their names to be listed in the credits.

Caligula Gaius Caesar was a demented Roman emperor who ruled from AD 37 to 41. His reign was short, as was his popularity, but by the time he was murdered at the age of twenty-nine, he had already been around too long.

Malcolm McDowell – who seems to have made a career from playing nutters – stars in the title role, and bounds through the incest, homosexuality, buggery, necrophilia and rape as though they were cocktail sports in Brighton.

As the film begins, Caligula is summoned to Capri by his adoptive grandfather, Emperor Tiberius (Peter O’Toole, toothless and covered in sores), where he watches a group of youths and maidens acting out the old man’s fantasies – after casually disembowelling a drunken soldier.

“Little Boots” (that’s what Tiberius calls Caligula) repays grandad for his kindness by letting his pal Macro (Guido Mannari), commander of the Praetorian Guard, smother him.

Don’t worry – Macro is soon for the chop himself.

Safely installed as Consul, Caligula has an affair with his sister, Drusilla (Teresa Ann Savoy) and dresses up as a woman to cast an eye over the likely candidates for a wife among the priestesses in the Temple of Isis – the winner is Caesonia (played by gorgeous Helen Mirren, who spends more time out of her kecks than in them).

Already crazier than three drunken billy goats, Caligula’s power and paranoia increase, resulting in a lengthy smorgasbord of explicit sex mixed with assorted horrors such as disembowelment, castration, decapitation (there’s even a giant lawn mower that chops heads off) and strangulation.

Hands are shoved into fires. Freaks are tortured and mutilated. Babies’ heads are smashed against marble walls. The most graphic sexual aberrations flourish in close-ups. Torsos are dismembered, while blood and viscera splatter the camera lens.

Meanwhile, Caligula throws orgies, mocks gods, overthrows the government, and insults Rome’s best families while a thunderous orchestra plays music that sounds like Stormy Weather.

There are vulgar sets, tacky costumes and dopey lines like “The priestesses of Isis are meeting at my house tonight”.

And in between, a screen full of naked Penthouse centrefolds fondle each other, crawl around on all fours like asylum inmates, roll their tongues, and do the most imaginative things with spikes.

Many of the most explicit scenes – which serve absolutely no purpose in the plot – were added afterwards by the filmmakers to sex up proceedings without informing the star cast. The results are often grotesque.

A fascinating movie if you have the stomach for it.

Caligula
Malcolm McDowell
Drusilla
Teresa Ann Savoy
Tiberius
Peter O’Toole
Macro
Guido Mannari
Claudius
Giancarlo Badessi
Nerva
John Gielgud
Gemellus
Bruno Brive
Caesonia
Helen Mirren

Director
Tinto Brass

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