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55

I watched this on the t.v. in my garage, while eating Count Chocula dry, out of the box, so…I guess you could say I know a thing or two about opulence, myself.

14

It's hard (sorry) to know how to review Caligula, especially in its full length (sorry again) version. I've seen lots of 10/10 reviews on other sites, but you can't help feeling (ahem) that they are actually reviewing the behind-the-scenes story. That of course is incredible, hilarious and tragic - all things that the film should be but isn't. It's swollen (cough), sloppy (cough cough) and gets itself into a proper mess (nurse!). Mark Kermode famously said that there was a great film in here waiting to get out, but surely that disappeared up its own rectum (OK that one's just a single entendre) when Brass started interfering (fnarr) with Gore Vidal's original script. You sense that even before Guccione began…

51

static disco or decay so slow a mimicry of mercy, a recessed deluxe garbage disposal in a third or fourth vacation condo as yet unvisited purchased for tax schemes, the fascist aqueduct private/public partnership a gilded toilet mounting to the sky in vulgar lazy spirals to challenge a god it doesn't believe in by virtue of having an embarrassment of riches so replete as to be nearly authorless: an apex of wasted arrogance, a cloud, a chant, an endless glittering river of cruelty, avarice, privilege, vapidity, idiocy, distracted perversion; an abandoned superyacht, meals half-consumed on the plate, music still playing over the internal speakers, some word that was meant to be portentious scrawled in blood and feces and cocaine and…

21

Does anyone Ben-Hur? No, I don't mean the 2016 remake. I'm talking about the 1959 version that was (at the time) the most ambitious and expensive undertaking Hollywood had yet attempted. I mean, this sucker was the 50s equivalent of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. With a whopping budget of $15.2 million (yeah, it doesn't sound like much today), the largest sets ever constructed for a film, roughly a hundred people churning out costumes, and hundreds of artists crafting statues and friezes, it was exactly the kind of filmmaking excess that only Hollywood is capable of.

Tinto Brass' Caligula is basically that... if it was a hardcore porno film.

This is, without a doubt, the most ambitious…

Review by james ★★½

wanted to like this for my boy malcolm but it gave me a secondhand UTI :/

Review by Slig001 ★★★★½

A depiction of the corruption of absolute power. A maniac, propelled to rule by sheer lust and narcissim; elongating his reign through fear, a diet of lies fed to the people of Rome, who are placated with bribes. Thank God the people of today would never stand for anything like this! Caligula is an uncompromising grandiose spectacle. Brought to life by erotic film director Tinto Brass; Caligula is both an A-list epic and a dirty lowdown porn film. It's debauchery for the masses, as was clearly intended. The film benefits from high production values - the sets and costumes are of a very high standard, and the scenes are very well composed; and this if anything makes the near constant…

67

Fully Uncut 156-minutes Version

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
-Mark 8:36

When it comes to defending a film and stating, in the clearest way, what I approve and don't approve in cinema, I must resort to the objectivity of my foundations which, instead of defining as "Christian", I define them as God's. God has shaped my entire life and, through cinema, gave me a responsibility to promote Word's God and also the gift God can grant to human beings of appreciating art without neither glorifying nor accepting its thematic evils to the extent of not even being influenced by them.

For the purpose of this, I…

Review by John Ruhl

Malcolm McDowell’s commentary for this is without a doubt one of the most insane, uproariously hysterical commentaries I have ever listened to. He made this film’s production sound like a demented mix of Boogie Nights and The Disaster Artist.

Caligula is without a doubt the pinnacle of unclean cinema. It’s gaudy as hell and is so perverse and exhausting that you have never seen anything like it with respectable actors in your life.

Highlights From The Commentary:
- The horse that is in bed at one point was doped up and woke up and didn’t know what the hell was going on and kicked his trainer in the forehead and knocked him back twenty feet and Malcom McDowell said that…

Review by Daniel ★★½

"I offer my life if Jupiter will only spare our beloved Emperor!"
"Jupiter accepts your offer. Execute him!"

In 37 AD, young Gaius Caesar Germanicus (Malcolm McDowell) - nicknamed 'Caligula' - is called to the palace of his ailing great-uncle, Roman Emperor Tiberius (Peter O'Toole). Both appalled and fascinated by the depravity Caligula witnesses there, he immediately becomes embroiled in court intrigue. When Tiberius dies soon after, Caligula makes a move for the throne ...

I watched the uncut version

Caligola ("Caligula") is an erotic historical drama film directed by Tinto Brass, and written by Gore Vidal, based on the life of Roman Emperor Caligula.

While a movie about the infamous Caligula with names like Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, John…

2

Cringe Movie Bucket List

The height of Roman debauchery and perversion.

"If only all of Rome had just one neck."

The infamous two and a half-hour long film Caligula, is both a deeply fascinating and disturbing portrayal of one of histories most demented rulers ... ohhh and it also easily qualifies as pornography. There is a really good film within this long spectacle of nudity, torture, and unsimulated sex. And it could be summed up as a less weird, but more vulgar version of 'Fellini Satyricon'.

"Let them hate me, so long as they fear me."

For one, there is an all-star cast featuring amazing performances from Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, and Helen Mirren. Then you have the great production…

2

I watch Caligula every few years just to make sure that I'm still alive.

1

14/100

Watched the original theatrical version with the Guccione porn inserts, which aren't remotely erotic but do nonetheless occasionally puncture the general tedium. (Reconstructed Brass cut could only be superior in the sense that having the measles is preferable to contracting bubonic plague; there's zero chance that a non-terrible movie could be constructed from this footage. In any case, I wasn't about to sit through it again.) Fascinating to see such a stellar cast flailing so pathetically—only Gielgud escapes with his dignity intact, and you'd never guess that McDowell, Mirren, and O'Toole had a speck of talent among them. Also hard to believe that a film so aggressively lurid could be so stultifyingly dull, rarely even rising (or sinking, I guess) to the level of camp. Just long, unpleasant and cruel—the cinematic equivalent of sitting in the Colosseum as Christians are thrown to the lions.