Here it is, in all its seedy absurdity and shame-filled grandeur, the controversial 1979 Romesploitation shocker Caligula, originally released towards the end of the movies’ porn-chic period. It is about the rise and fall of obscene tyrant Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and ennobled his horse. It is now rereleased in an extensively reconstructed and restored form, with a wittily designed new opening title sequence showing an animated Malcolm McDowell doing the “Caligula” dance.
This is the version originally envisaged before producer Bob Guccione took over at the editing stage and tried to raunch the whole thing up for commercial purposes by adding extraneous porn footage, which infuriated the director Giovanni “Tinto” Brass – hardly, as they say, a choirboy in these matters – and screenwriter Gore Vidal. Both wanted their names taken off the credits. Had he been around today, I suspect Vidal might well have whimsically announced he still wanted his name removed; he originally told interviewers he saw Caligula as an essentially ordinary person corrupted by power and fate and said that his preferred casting in the lead would be a young Mickey Rooney in clean-cut Andy Hardy mode.
