More than that, though, this movie is not a movie. It is an act of defamation. What reached the screen was a distortion of the film that its makers had made. In conception, Caligula was an absurdist comedy, though with a few horrifyingly disturbing scenes. It was meant as a joke, and political power was the butt of that joke. The editing crew (among the best in the world), the re-recording crew (among the best in the world), the mixing crew (among the best in the world), and the lab crew (among the best in the world), were all put into the unenviable position of making sense of over 96 hours of footage without the benefit of the filmmakers to explain what that footage was supposed to mean, and how it was supposed to fit together. The shooting script was of no help whatever in interpreting the footage. Operating in the dark, without a map of the territory, with 96 hours of footage demonstrating cameras twirling around and zooming madly from one detail to another, the post-production crews tried to remember what little they had learned in grade school about a mad emperor, and hammered the material into some sort of shape that seemed to show a mad emperor.

Caligula (1979)
Directed by: Bob Guccione, Tinto Brass
Written by: Bob Guccione, Giancarlo Lui, Gore Vidal
Starring: Guido Mannari, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O' Toole, Teresa Ann Savoy

HCF GUILTY PLEASURES: CALIGULA [1979]

AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

RUNNING TIME: 156 min/ 150 min/ 149 min/ 145 min/ 133 min/ 123 min/ 102 min/ 90 min/ 86 min, probably some other running times
Sattva descreen serial.

REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic

Caligula, the young heir to the throne of the syphilis-ridden, half-mad Emperor Tiberius, thinks he has received a bad omen after a blackbird flies into his room early one morning. Shortly afterward, Macro, the head of the Praetorian Guard, appears to tell Caligula that Tiberius, his great uncle, demands that he report at once to the island of Capri, where the Emperor has been residing for a number of years. There, Caligula, who himself is sexually involved with his own sister, finds that Tiberius has become depraved and showing signs of advanced venereal diseases. Tiberius jokingly tries to poison Caligula and one of Tiberius’ friends commits suicide on the prospect of Caligula’s rule. Caligula is saved from killing the dying Tiberius by Macro, who commits the deed himself, choking Tiberius and now ensuring that Caligula becomes Emperor….

How times change. When Caligula first hit UK cinemas in 1979, it had 11 min cut from it, was widely denounced as garbage, and was even more hacked down for video releases where it very hard to see unless you were savvy enough to read advertisements in the back of certain film magazines advertising rare and uncut movies for sale [I plead guilty]. In 2007, the film received a fabulous four disc DVD set full of special features and three versions of the film including the full uncut version, which contained some hardcore porn shots. I couldn’t believe that you could actually go into HMV and pick this up, but there it was, with all the ‘normal’ films. It’s right though that Caligula was eventually treated so well on DVD, because whatever you think of it, it is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind film that is hard to believe actually got made. It’s part historical drama and part sex and violence exploitation, and a film featuring pornographic footage that stars major stars, which unbelievably include Peter O’ Toole and John Gielgud. It’s considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made. In whichever cut you watch, and there are more cuts of this film than few others, it’s a mess, and viewing it is sometimes close to the experience of slowing down on a road to watch a car crash – you’re aghast but fascinated at the same time – but it has some praise-worthy things in it, contains traces of a truly fine film, and is just so totally insane you have to kind of admire it if you appreciate films that are off the beaten track.

Championed by a few, loathed by the many, Caligula is surely among the most mangled, mutilated, misunderstood movies in cinema history.There are several tie-in books already, but they don’t provide any believable background details about how and why the movie came to be made amidst conflict, how and why the movie was so changed afterwards that the writer. Helen Mirren in a scene from Caligula. An uncut version of the 1970s film is set to make its way on to the High Street after censorship was lifted It was meant to be an historical drama, detailing. In Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, Vezzoli makes a film trailer for a movie that does not exist, interpreted by international stars and personalities from the world of television and independent cinema such as Gore Vidal, Helen Mirren and Courtney Love, among others. The result is a parody that focuses on the sex-power binomial. One is hard-pressed to think of a more reviled film graced with such a gala presentation, but Caligula's defenders and the curious will be amply rewarded with both the original uncut theatrical version of the film and a re-edited alternate version. Supplementary material includes an hour of deleted footage, a pretentious 'making of' documentary. Caligula (1979) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more.

The project had its origins in a TV series which was to be written and directed by Roberto Rossellini. He died, but Roberto’s nephew decided to turn it into a film, and hired the playwright Gore Vidal to write the script. Only Penthouse founder and publisher Bob Guccione was willing to finance the project. Directors John Huston and Lina Wertmuller turned it down and Tinto Brass came on board, along with a strong cast. Shooting for what became a hugely troubled production began in 1976. Vidal insulted Brass in an interview and was sacked, Brass rewrote much of the script, star Maria Schneider resigned because of the nudity, the budget was too low for such an ambitious film causing set designer Danilo Donati to re-do most of his sets and even causing script changes, and Brass and Guccione kept falling out, mainly due to Guccione wanting more and more sex in the film. After endless delays the film seemed finished, but then Guccione fired Brass for going way over the budget and extensively re-edited the film and replaced some of Brass’s footage with newly shot hardcore porn, supposedly unknown to most of the stars. The release was further delayed by Brass and Vidal launching lawsuits against Guccione. Vidal and John Gielgud got their names taken off the film and few others involved wanted anything to do with it. Amazingly, or perhaps not, it was a success in many countries despite usually being cut and sometimes even banned. During the time span of its post-production difficulties, Rossellini produced a second film titled Messalina, Messalina with the same sets and costumes, and soon after Joe D’ Amato brought out Caligula 2: The Untold Story, which similarly contained hardcore porn.

I could spend ages detailing the different versions of Caligula, and will only mention the main ones. The original UK cinema release lost 11 min of hardcore sex and violence but had 4 min of alternate footage put back in, running 149 min. The most widely distributed US version ran 102 min, removing many dramatic scenes too, though I once saw a UK video on a shelf running as short as 90 min! In 1984 Rosselini released his own 133 min cut in Italy which itself was re-edited at least twice. In 1999 Channel 4 showed a 145 min version [ partly shorter due to PAL speed-up] which contained some alternate footage and some creative panning and scanning. Then in 2007 for the DVD set which also released the original 1979 cut with hardcore, a new 153 min cut was created which not only, as per some other versions, replaced most of the hardcore footage with alternate shots and even some 16 mm shots they found, but re-arranged some scenes in keeping with Brass’s original vision for the film. Recently, Brass has announced that he is going to work on a genuine ‘director’s cut’ of Caligula. I’m not a fan of Brass, whether as an avant garde filmmaker or as a soft pornographer: he seems to me to be a very minor filmmaker with occasional artistic aspiration

Caligula The Movie Uncut