Caligula is what happens when a prominent writer gets a titty magazine to finance a historical epic. This movie is 27 different kinds of crazy failure.

I heard about Caligula a while ago and was intrigued. The second it popped up on instant netflix I hit the “add to queue” button faster than I could say ORGY! Which is exactly what I would end up saying about halfway through this goddamned movie. Right off the bat Caligula blindsides you with more exposed flesh than you were probably prepared for, and I even saw Prospero’s Books (Yeah! Film geek cred!). Within the first few seconds there was a boob just bouncing around. This itself wasn’t that shocking, after all, I just watched Thankskilling. But a few minutes in I’d seen every body part known to man in just about every angle filmable.

Sandwiched in to all these tits and cock (I’m going to be saying tits and cock SO MUCH for the rest of this review) are respectable actors: Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Fucking Toole! Peter O’Toole is in this! The first time you see him he’s swimming around a giant pool with big syphalis wounds on his face fondling a bunch of naked women.

You’ve come a long way, good sir.

This is where the movie starts getting nuts, and this is where I’m going to stop my review for a moment and give you a bit of background. In 1975 Gore Vidal wrote a script for a big historical epic based on the life of Caligula, the bat-shit crazy ceasar who fucked anything that moved and appointed his horse a priest. Failing to raise money for his movie in ways that didn’t involve titty magazines, Vidal contacted Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse, and Guccione agreed to finance the movie as long as he could add in gratuitous nudity and sex. Vidal, obviously, agreed. The following production was plagued with difficulties (going over budget, badly-constructed sets, titties not good enough) and resulted in a bunch of haphazard scenes of poorly edited incoherence. By the time the movie was finished the director was fired and Vidal took a pay cut in order to have his name removed because he HATED IT SO MUCH.

This is where things get crazier. Bob Guccione, unhappy with the finished product he was given, hired a new director and, using the costumes and sets and equipment he already had, shot a bunch of hardcore porn and edited it into the movie. Are you hearing me? The end result was a film in which shots of Peter O’Toole were seamlessly integrated with blowjobs. Wikipedia offers a handy list of the sexual acts that made it into the finished cut of the movie, including “orgies, masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, anal fisting, homosexuality, transvestism, incest, rape, urination, as well as scenes of decapitation of prisoners by a giant “killing machine,” infanticide, implied fratricide, and penile as well as testicular castration”, the majority of which made it into the scene at the beginning of the film with Peter O’Motherfucking Toole. There is literally a shot of Pete and Malcolm walking past a guy jacking off. Peter O’Toole gotta eat, I guess.

That pretty much brings me back to the movie. Now if you’re reading all of this and thinking “Holy shit, I gotta see that!” don’t add it to your instant queue just yet. The version on Netflix, the version I watched, is apparently the most censored version of the film (read: British), which in ways makes it way more insane. In order to cut out all the shots of anal-fisting and labia-licking and good old fashioned cock-sucking (because there’s a LOT of it in there) the censored version is hacked up into a garbled mess. The scene I mentioned before with Pete and Malcolm walking around is chopped up so bad that they end up in different parts of the set shot to shot. The camera keeps cutting away to random repeated shots; I couldn’t tell what was going on, especially when they overlapped the original audio to leave in conversation and I could actually HEAR, just not SEE, a guy masturbating. I’m not joking. At all.

What about the stuff they left in, you ask? Well that’s pretty hard to comprehend also. There is so much tits and cock in this movie you eventually forget that 98% of the actors on camera are fucking naked. I guess that’s why they threw in baffling set pieces like this:

Oh this? This is just my dick lamp.

I never thought I’d have to say “I lost count of all the penis-shaped props in that movie” but fate, that cruel bitch, has proven me wrong. Now if you’re still morbidly curious about those infamous scenes (like I clearly was) you can pretty easily find them on the magical internet. No, I’m not going to link them, but they’re there. Like the uncut imperial orgy scene, which has a lovely ending shot of jizz that fades into Caligula riding a horse into battle. Or the apparently completely cut scene where Caligula is doing his SISTER while 2 lesbians watch through a hole in the wall before they decide to eat each other out for a few minutes. The hilarious thing about all the hardcore sex is that none of the actors knew it was going to be cut into the movie. Imagine if you were Helen Mirren watching the movie for the first time after shooting it and seeing a shot of yourself being all grand and queen like only to be immediately followed by a nice big close up of some penetration. But seriously, the movie was funded by Penthouse. She was lucky a cock didn’t end up in her somewhere on screen.

If you look close enough there’s probably somebody fucking in that picture.

Caligula is a terrific failure. It would have probably been a half decent movie without the constant barrage of tits and cock, but the addition of straight up porno makes it it’s own creature. What it boils down to is this: There are 2 types of movies in the world. Porn and every other type of movie. Here’s a handy way of figuring out if the movie you just made is porn:

1. Does it show oral sex?
2. Does it show penetration?
3. Does it show every other sex act created?

If you answered yes to any of these then you just made a porno. If you answered yes to all of these, you just made Caligula II: The Revenge of the Orgy…I was also gonna try and work a Brown Bunny joke in there but I think everyone’s tired of that one.

KISSES!
-JON:)