One of the most notorious films in cinematic history is 1979’s Caligula, starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Teresa Ann Savoy, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. The latter two no doubt feeling blindsided and betrayed more than the many of the personnel dumped into this vile erotic historical film pushing all boundaries of good taste depicting the perversions of the Roman Emperor Caligula. Still likely missing the real Caligula’s debauched bar by many feet.

Caligula was a huge success based on its nefarious reputation for sex, gore, incest and even its grand scale unheard of for independent filmmaking at the time. The aim of Penthouse magazine founder, Bob Guccione, was to lay down an explicit account of Emperor Caligula’s rise and immediate fall with a high stakes budget striving for the grandiose production value of Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. Despite the omnipresent nudity and (depending on which version you watch) full-frontal sex action, Guccione was reported to have said about Caligula, “I maintain the film is actually anti-erotic. In every one of its scenes, you’ll find a mixture of gore or violence or some other rather ugly things.”

Caligula’s infamy was further plagued by financial woes, scriptwriter knifing, in-house fighting, directorial headbutting, post-production hell and most ostensibly, the rogue filming by Guccione himself of separate, XXX rated pornography featuring his Penthouse Pets which he’d snuck into the film’s original print. In the process, slashing numerous narrative, dialogue and plot sequences to shoehorn his full penetration scenes. None of the film’s original actors were aware of this intrusion, which went so far as to include hardcore sequences of homosexuality and Anneka Di Lorenzo’s legendary fellatio scene, still the most graphic to occur outside of a true porn film. This considering Guccione axed most of Gore Vidal’s script (the second to write one) due to its numerous boundary-pushing gay scenes. Guccione paid out and offered Vidal a pitiful “Based on the script” credit.

Many involved in Caligula, including Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole and director Tinto Brass, disowned the film, the latter demanding his role be reduced to “principal photography.” Even score writer (one of Caligula’s brighter beacons) Bruno Nicolai issued his soundtrack under the alias Paul Clemente. I’m a big fan of McDowell’s and now having watched the “Ultimate Cut,” my fourth overall sitting, I can see why he won’t “go there” in interviews. Yet he is magnetic, unbridled fury in and out of a toga. He is masterful in what he was expected to do. His Caligula serves as a can-you-take-it styled public service announcement, which is the movie’s founding statement: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. There are tons for McDowell to be held accountable for in Caligula, but there’s also understated nobility to his work here.

If you’re so inclined, there’s a bounty of deeper insight into Caligula to read on your own, but for me, the movie has always been a fascination, leading me to the new “Ultimate Cut” which got such hype at the Cannes film festival last year. Like it or not for purists, this one restrains the gore and outright turns the film softcore. Which are really the movie’s calling cards, since this is probably the most expensive and elaborate crock ‘o shock ever filmed. A flying turd of an ode to despotism which, at least, finally justifies its reason for existence in the first place, never mind the T&A and waggling manhood still occupying 90% of the new version’s three-hour excursion into depravity.

As a teenager, me and a few of my buddies who couldn’t get enough horror films and porn in our oversexed lives sought Caligula out amidst other forbidden fruit of the times like Pieces, Cannibal Holocaust, Don’t Go Into the Basement and Make Them Die Slowly. We were gore and sex addicts befitting of our young, dumb boy ages, and we had an “in” at our local video store back the in mid 1980s. At ages 15, we got our hands on these banned films (Caligula included, which the hardcore version had been so vilified prints were destroyed on-hand) from our 19-year-old buddy who was easily paid off in the way of pizza flavored Combos, Snickers bars and other junk food. He would slip us these foul VHS films under hard cases of more innocuous release titles. In other words, we got our hands on Caligula inside a videotape case for, of all movies–laughing out loud–The Goonies!

Thus, we were huddled into our one buddy’s basement (identity forever protected, lol) and pounding down microwave popcorn with the 1980 American release version Caligula, gawking and laughing and pointing like the pathetic nerds we were at the parade of skin and pubic hair. Thinking we were getting away with the scam of a lifetime with the simulated sex in this version, unaware there was far more to see which had been trimmed. None of us gave a damn about the story. We screamed aghast at the Roman guard who was force fed wine with his penis tied with leather and subsequently castrated when he couldn’t release his waste.

We hollered at Malcolm McDowell (already calling him a genius for his seminal performance as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange), branding him a son of a bitch for betraying loyal captain of the guard, Macro (Guido Mannari) who killed Caesar, the Emperor Tiberius (O’Toole) to help him ascend to Roman rule. Still, we stupidly cheered at that memorable decapitation by sawblades from the moving stage. We groaned at Caligula’s ongoing, hormonal sweat for his sister, Drusilla (Savoy) while still considering the nauseatingly infantile idea of incest in-bounds for someone so hot. Of course, once Caligula got his divine schlong into his future bride, Caesonia (Mirren), things seemed as right as could for a movie as cruelly fucked up this. Then the wedding reception scene came, oy. Then the Imperial Brothel. Let’s cut it off there.

Much later in life, I was made aware a print of Caligula was circulating around 2007, claiming to have fully restored Guccione’s slimy sex scenes. Of course I watched it, at 2:00 a.m. after reviewing a Manowar (that’s a heavy metal band) DVD, coming to bed before sunup. My thoughts: One, I was no longer the teenager I was, and the film had landed overall like a wet fart with me despite the gratuitous sex added to the girl-on-girl from the 1980s print and far more to the Imperial Brothel. I thought Caligula was garbage, yet I was turned on and ashamed of myself. Again, let’s cut it off there.

Which leads us to 2024-25 and this “Ultimate Cut” edition of Caligula which purports to have trashed the original print altogether and begins anew with AI-restored dialogue and a needless new score which often sounds like soulless coldwave better served in a Resident Evil game. This version seeks to atone for some, if not all of its sins. Taming the shrew, as it were, and yet again falling miles short of being the erotic masterpiece one hipster claims it is. The sets and costumes are even more lush and vibrant in this polished remaster, while the new version claims to have recut the entire movie from thousands of segments left on the cutting room floor. You can spot some angle changes and new dynamics, and a few scenes were shifted around from the 1980 cut. As alluded earlier, some were obliterated altogether.

At my age now, I care less about the sex in this movie. I let it cross my eyes again for the explicit (pun intended) purposes of seeing what was alleged to have been sacrificed at the hands of porn-peddling Bob Guccione. Sure, there is more dialogue than actual narrative, which slows this thing down even more than it already is. The skin trade has always been camouflaging a weak sense of storytelling to this film and that sadly remains so. Worse to some effects, since it’s the sex and lurid violence drawing us to a tawdry, mean-spirited tale of comeuppance and insanity and how an exploited citizenry ultimately reacts to it.

Which parallels what we’re witnessing in the world today. Caligula elevating himself to kingship and then godhood is not only haughty and nihilistic, it becomes a reflective mirror to the imperiousness we’re facing right now. Caligula controls his Senate and the Roman public to such effortlessness he mocks his cabinet and populace as sheep. Such callous disregard for his people and constituency becomes his ultimate undoing. Becoming a paranoiac to such lengths of suspicion of assassination at every turn, his lunatic ways foster this exact outcome.

Endpoint.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.