The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

As a piece of high film-making, this is acceptable trash. It's over-the-top blubbery and overblown. The 'I wanna be Fellini' italo-euro 70's stylings don't help. It's hard to believe that anyone ever thought this thing should be taken seriously... so I don't! I look at Caligula as a blowout-budget b-movie. It allows me to laugh at the effluvia on the screen while simultaneously looking at boobies, and heaven forbid, actual copulation (depending on the version). It saves the film from being a poorly lit, pretentiously staged, unevenly acted pile of rueful garbage. Each and every one of the big names that appeared in this probably rues the day they heard of Bob Guccione, but they all cashed the checks...

Foremost this movie is an old memory as my parents rented it on a Betamax tape in 1984 to watch it with my grandparents during a Saturday night ! As it was very unusual for my brother and I to go to bed like this, i think we asked them the day after how was the movie and they got really upset and don't want to talk about it ! For sure i recorded the data for later and as an adult, it was a duty to look for it ! Honestly it's very hardcore, graphic and i can't fathom my parents watching it with their family as as this time in France no porn movies were aired to the TV ! The great idea of Guccione was to sell it as a Peplum and not like an adult movie ! For a naive audience (like my family), they see a cover with a roman coin so it's very innocent ! This movie is such a classic that every antiquity hot scene looks like it ! The girls, and especially Anneka, are beautiful and are really skilled experts : all the sexual combination are done and it's totally exciting (especially the lesbian, orgy scenes)! I don't know if it's the most expensive porn movie ever but at least, the production is sumptuous and the sets looks like the best Hollywood movies (and have also some big names in it!). For me, it's thus a really must see movie !

Certainly Malcolm McDowall has been excellently cast as the most nefarious of ancient rulers. Whether you have read historical accounts of his life or Jay Robinson's portrayals in "The Robe" and "Demetrius and the Gladiators", or most notably John Hurt's in " I, Claudius", then you know what a mad man he was. Taking that BBC mini-series to a different level in dramatic liberties, adding various perversions into the story.Starting from the last days of Tiberius (Peter O'Toole, much more lively than the subtle George Baker of "I, Claudius"), this tries to give the impression that Caligula didn't really start going mad until Tiberius began taunting him about being murdered by family members himself. It lacks the motivation of what Caligula was like as a child which through history made him mad from the start.The sexual activity of the film gets boring after a while, showing straight and gay sexual acts of every kind and even having McDowall deflowering a virginal bride on the wedding night and even taking it upon himself to humiliate the groom as well. While not shocking to me, I just found it gratuitous to show that, especially after a scene where Caligula and his court pelt victims of a head chopping machine with eggs right before they get lopped off.It's lavish to look at, much like a Fellini movie, but lacks in real artistic flair. A lengthy orgy scene with Tiberius is tried to be topped later with one when Caligula turns the senator's wives into prostitutes for his palace bordello. There are some moments where I did laugh and do double takes, but mostly, my eyes just rolled.John Gielgud manages to save some dignity by departing after only two scenes. I couldn't even recognize a young Helen Mirren, and I didn't care enough to rewind. But the hand on the fast forward button did come in handy to get through close-ups of the groins of naked women, leading to unnecessary lesbian sex scenes. All I really wanted to see were the historical highlights. The rest of it, well, not so special, and ultimately sleep inducing.

When a glorified pimp steals control of a masterpiece, and when the moral compasses of all involves withers away, then worlds of cinemas collapse. Logical, no? Once, several years before Star Wars, Gore Vidal wrote a screenplay about possibly the most depraved Roman emperor of Ancient times. It's probably safe to say that his mistake was in asking a porn magazine to fund this movie's production. Throw in the involvement of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione and you have Caligula, one of the most notorious failures of 70s cinema. While it's not quite as vicious as Cannibal Holocaust, it's still excessively exploitative; while Holocaust used real killings, Caligula used real sex - so as to try to boost sales of Penthouse magazine, apparently. So what grabbed my attention for this film so strongly, especially when I initially thought it'd give me nightmares? I mean it's not like it's entirely historically accurate, is it? Well... it's got Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, among others. And the musical score is recognisable, at least among classical music aficionados.Well, I took one for the team when I went to pick up a copy of the Imperial Edition DVD set. This included the uncut release... which SHOULD warrant an R18 where I live but somehow doesn't... the 1999 "Rated Version", misrepresented as the "Theatrical Version"... and there's the one I chanced at, the Alternative "Pre-Release" Edition, a new edit created from an earlier cut which re-arranges a few scenes back into their original context, and most of the explicit sexual inserts added by Guccione are removed, filled in by a handful of 16mm behind-the-scenes footage. So, fair enough, it's not so much of a sex film as it was before. But not even that could save Caligula from being one of the most miserable films I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing.From start to finish this turkey blows (in more ways than one!), and it's not hard to see why: you have three conflicting artistic differences duking it out, and while sometimes it works, it can't really be excused that sometimes you can forget you're watching a film with explicit sex, and then a helping of genitalia brings you back to earth with an unpleasant thump. Not to mention the violence, as well - in one early scene, a soldier has several gallons of wine poured down his gullet, and Tiberius personally pokes a hole in him... just to prove to us that neither the Ancient Romans nor the Modern Writers have limits when it comes to pointless and senseless violence. Still... I guess it's fair game if, historically, Tiberius ordered to have the scales of a fish rub off a victim's face...And as for the explicit porn - how did this get into public cinemas again? It's clear proof that Bob was a sex tycoon who sneaked back onto the set to film a hardcore porno movie for which - though as I recall, most of the acts are legal - the authorities could shut down the set and sentence everyone to jail. It almost happened anyway - in several theatres the movie was shut down and seized by police! I'm just saying that this is the sort of thing that doesn't bear watching if you aren't in the mood. I'm not going to say anything about them, for obvious reasons. Even if I did, perhaps my arguments would be invalid - except for the fact that they replaced some of the more important scenes.This excessive sex and violence aside, the point is this: Caligula in general is a major dud - a long, drawn-out (seriously it drags on well over two hours!!) piece of work of which not one bit is historically accurate, nor assembled in a historically accurate order. If Bob was holding out for artistic freedom, then he'd failed in that respect because really, even ART has standards! Of course, it's not all bad news... Malcolm, Helen, Peter, John and co. did a fairly good job in their acting, and the music, like I said, is a splendid compilation to listen to. The sets aren't bad either, even if they do represent a nightmarish version of Ancient Rome. Also on the Imperial Edition DVD, there are a few deleted scenes which SHOULD have stayed in the film, as they surely would make it less of a disgrace than it is now. A complete and detailed history of the production of the film is also being written by James Ellis Chaffin and Ranjit Sandhu, with research from Thomas Ryerson, called 200 Degrees of Failure: The Unmaking of Caligula, slated for a release sometime this year, or possibly the next. You can find a lot of their research at their site (caligula.ws). I'm sure that the story behind how Gore Vidal's work fell apart would be a much interesting read, and I'm looking forward to it.