Recently I re-watched the infamous penthouse film Calligula, which I had not seen since I was a teen. And while it is outrageous shite, and even somehow boring, it does have a certain inexplicable charm, with certainly a number memorable moments. Moments that linger in that special way that only unrestrained 70s cinema tends to.
The only way you might call it a success is in being nothing less than it set out to be, and for wearing its heart on its crass and tactless sleeve.70s cinema was to me the pinnacle of the art, where the ardent desire to add gritty realism to films resulted in a lot of this kind of experimental exploitation. New Hollywood Scorcese-eque palettes of hyper-sex and hyper-violence, often racist and with doom-endings. Calligula itself, as a film appears to be an excuse to depict orgy scenes in a remotely historical context, though it chooses to do so joylessly and nihilistically.
Despite being universally panned audiences at the time flocked to it, which seems hard to imagine today.
I don’t myself appreciate the depiction of Romans as quite so decadent as this (despite the historic reality of Rome’s most notorious emperor). And as a Penthouse production you might have expected more of what we might call a sort of ‘sex-positive’ portrayal, in defence of their industry, but instead we find a mirthless critique of Rome itself in its exaggeratedly perversity (particularly Peter O’Toole’s Tiberius). Even the soldiers and senate seem silly, there is very little attention paid to what would have been their strict religious practice, and I suspect the set design is a failed attempt at a ‘Fellini-esque’ grandeur off oddness, but quite often seems more akin to Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra (overblown and silly).
McDowell’s performance you can at least say is quite adequate, though he is bare-balls naked a good bit of the time, and must commit at least one scene of emulated ‘homo-sexual fisting’.
Still, despite being admittedly terrible, darkly depraved, amazingly dull despite the constant eroticism, as well as oddly edited as though it were an boring documentary of sadism, I must somehow recommend it as a must-see bit of 70s lowlife grit.
Sometimes shit films just have to be seen. What can I say?
