CALIGULA (1979) Blessed be the depraved decadence of Imperial Rome - and Hollywood circa 1979! I always figured that when people said that there was forty minutes of hard-core porno in this movie, they must've been exaggerating. Would John Gielgud be in a movie with forty minutes of hard-core porno in it? Malcolm McDowell, sure, and Peter O'Toole has at least got the name for it...but Helen Mirren? Hah - now I know better. The porn in this movie was put in by producer Bob Guccione, who doesn't want to show you anything if he can't show you women peeing. I two-fisted this one with the Michael Jackson interview and was surprised by the parallels. Michael Jackson sleeps with little boys...but not sexually. Caligula sleeps with his horse...and if this relationship was sexual, I'm sure this movie would've taken great steps to leave me with no doubt. Caligula is the story of the infamous Roman Emperor who, if this movie is to be believed, was probably the worst boss in the history of bosses. Case in point: a loyal soldier in his army, Proculus. Caligula (played by Malcolm McDowell) interrupts Proculus's wedding to his virgin bride, deflowers the sobbing woman and then fists the poor bastard right up the hoop, mildly lubricated by what appears to be unbaked pie crust. Later on, he has Proculus arrested and strung up, so he can kill him slowly with stabs and slashes, cutting off his penis and feeding it to his dogs, and sending his testicles out to his wife. Then women gleefully pee on the corpse. While he was still able to speak, Proculus not unreasonably asks what his crime was - Caligula says that he is a good soldier and an honest man, which makes him a bad Roman. Oh, that wacky Caligula. Caligula gets into power by knocking off grandpa, Tiberius Caesar, played by Peter O'Toole. Actually, Caligula doesn't do the deed - his chief sword-swinger Macro stops him and then does it himself to spare Caligula the political and moral ramifications. Caligula's thanks for this is to have Macro arrested and executed with a giant decapitation machine, throwing fruit at him and laughing as this poor bastard, buried up to his neck with the blades slowly approaching, looks pleadingly up at his emperor. Caligula makes life miserable and terrifying for just about anyone who knows him, while staying popular among the people by means left vague. He fakes an invasion of Britain, he wears a huge gold ring while he's fisting that guy, he has sex with his sister for the whole damn movie, probably the only person who's right when she assumes that he won't kill her horribly for being nice to him. This guy is so unredeemingly vile, that one wonders, at what point does tragedy - which by definition has a hero who is destroyed by his own flaws - become something else, when chief among those flaws is pretty much being the most reprehensible person imaginable? Some of his atrocities have a bit of whimsy to them, like taking all the senators' wives and employing them in a state-run brothel. Most are just mean. I don't claim to know where history ends and fiction begins here, but I think a better movie would add a certain "deliciousness" to his deeds, or at least his motives for them, and make me think "Ha ha, what's he gonna do next?" instead of "Why is it taking so long for his underlings to kill him?" I can't claim to know what anybody was thinking when they decided to make this movie, but I imagine Guccione might have wanted to fulfill the sex-loaded expectations of the Hugh Hefner-produced Macbeth. Oh, and make a ton of cash, which he did. Such a marriage of the big-budget historical epic and the porno movie was not to happen again. I've heard that to recoup their costs, tickets cost eight bucks a head at the time, which would be like, what, charging twenty-five today? Call me a geezer, but I remember when tickets were five - that's Canadian, I might add - and that was in the late 80's. While I'm glad a movie like this got made - Hollywood has long since lost the balls to even try something like it - it's still just a big, goofy mess overall. It's amusing at best as a historical epic, and as a porno movie, well, all these crotch shots get kind of wearying after a while. If it's eroticism you're looking for, be warned that there's a lot of gay. No doubt, it's one of a kind, and I don't feel too badly that it's stayed that way to this day. It's one of the more curious curiosities of cinema, but not much more. BACK TO THE C's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE