Caligula -- The Untold Story (Joe D'Amato, 1982)

Just when I thought I was done with Caligula movies, they pull me back in. This low-budget Italian take on the Caligula story, also known as Caligula 2, Caligula 2 -- The Untold Story, The Emperor Caligula: The Untold Story, Emperor Caligula: The Garden of Taboo, Decadencia, and Caligula 3, gives the material the low-rent approach it deserves but is unfortunately grindingly boring. With a running time of two hours and five minutes (on the cut of the film I watched on DVD; there are longer and shorter versions in other formats and releases), this Caligula is shorter than the 1979 epic (aka Guccione's Folly) by thirty or forty minutes but felt days longer. Like its more famous predecessor, it will make you tire of looking at naked people, with an approach to nudity more clinical than erotic. 

Back in the days of yore known as February of this year, I reviewed a perversely enjoyable D'Amato horror film called Beyond the Darkness. I liked that movie, and it gave me some hope D'Amato's take on Caligula wouldn't be a joyless slog. However, D'Amato directed 196 films between 1972 and 1999 (the year of his death, in which, despite declining health, he managed to direct five movies), and the odds he made at least a handful of terrible ones are pretty good. D'Amato was also a cinematographer on 170 films (he shot three the year of his death), a cameraman on 72 films, a writer on 47 films, a producer on 29 films, an actor in 15 films, an assistant director on six films, an editor on six films, a crew member on four films, and a location manager on a measly two films. I find this completely insane. Some of them were porno films, sure, which are quick and cheap, but that's still a staggering number of projects.

D'Amato had almost as many pseudonyms as film credits (in fact, D'Amato is a pseudonym, though it's the name most of his films are currently credited to; his birth name is Aristide Massaccesi), and Caligula is credited to one of his duller alter egos, David Hills. I wonder if that was the name he attached to the turkeys. If that's the case, I encourage you to do the opposite of one of Iron Maiden's greatest songs and run from the Hills. (I refuse to apologize for this dad joke. I don't have any kids, so you people will have to hear it.) Some of his more exciting noms de plume include Hugo Clevers, Raf de Palma, Dirk Frey, Igor Horwess, Una Pierre, Chana Lee Sun, and the amazing Arizona Massachuset.

You might have noticed that we are four paragraphs in, and I haven't even talked about the movie yet. Yeah, it's that bad. This Caligula covers a lot of the same territory as the Malcolm McDowell Caligula, with an orgy scene that's even longer, duller, and more explicit. What makes this film different, besides the much lower budget? Not much. Caligula's incestuous relationship with his sister is dispensed with in opening narration (it was a major part of the '79 Caligula), and a fictional relationship with a woman named Miriam (Black Emanuelle's Laura Gemser) is emphasized instead. She hatches an elaborate revenge plot to kill Caligula for what he's done to her best friend but instead falls in love with him because their sex life is so great. In this version, Caligula is haunted by a recurring dream of a man in armor killing him with an arrow on a sandy beach. And David Brandon's portrayal of Caligula is a lot more down-to-earth (and therefore, less fun) than McDowell's. McDowell played Caligula as a cross between a walking erect penis, a boyish imp, a '70s rock star on tour, and a homicidal lunatic. Brandon plays the mad emperor as a run-of-the-mill power-hungry dictator and self-absorbed politician with a sadistic streak and a conscience nagging at him for the damage he's caused. It's a more human way of looking at how Caligula did what he did, and Brandon gives a decent performance, but it's not that exciting. Oh yeah, you also see a woman jack off a horse. That didn't make it into the '79 version.

At its core, this film is a very boring historical epic on the cheap with occasional moments of splatter and gore, lots of nudity and sex scenes, and an orgy scene that turns the movie into a full-on hardcore porn film for about 30 minutes. I'm just not a porn guy. Looking at naked people is fun, but the clinical onslaught of body parts just makes me numb and bored after a few minutes. I like pizza, but I don't want to eat 30 pizzas in a row, you know what I'm saying?

An aside about orgies. In both the '79 Caligula and this one, a fully clothed juggler walks in and starts juggling away during the orgy. I turned to my wife during the interminable scene and asked her if she thought orgies still included jugglers. We started laughing imagining a 2010s orgy in a generic suburban house with a guy performing a juggling routine (oranges, maybe) amidst a room full of strangers engaged in group sex. Orgy people, leave a comment if you've ever seen a juggler at one of these wing-dings.

That's about it for Caligula -- The Untold Story. I wish it had remained untold. One of the alternate titles for this bad boy should be Caligula: Snoozefest. Sorry, D'Amato/Hills/Clevers/de Palma/Frey/Horwess/Pierre/Sun/Massachuset. In the immortal words of American Idol judge Randy Jackson, "yeah, that's gonna be a no for me, dawg."