Joe D’amato’s Caligula: The Untold Story from 1982 doesn’t hide its obvious inspiration.
Revisiting Caligula: The Untold Story from 1982!
Caligula: The Untold Story is an unusual movie. Despite being filled with violence, nudity and virtually every kind of perverse torture you can imagine, it still feels like a watered down movie. Of course, that’s because it’s riding on the coattails of 1979’s Caligula, one of the most infamous exploitation movies of all time.
Compared to practically any movie besides Tinto Brass’s ‘79 degenerate art house classic, Caligula: The Untold Story would feel downright extreme. But when you’re imitating a gore-soaked historical epic that literally contained scenes of unsimulated sex, it’s kind of hard to one-up the source inspiration.
That’s not to say Caligula: The Untold Story is a bad movie, though. In fact, it’s definitely a guilty pleasure flick with better than expected acting, some downright great cinematography and even a few scenes on the verge of unironic brilliance. It’s nowhere near as memorable, awe-inspiring or disturbing as 1979’s Caligula, but if you catch the movie in the right mood you might find yourself enjoying it immensely.
The film comes to us from Joe D’amato. He’s the kind of director who doesn’t need much of an introduction for long-term exploitation horror fans. Absurd, Ator the Fighting Eagle, Antropophagus … his filmography is deep, indeed, with a career spanning from the 1950s all the way to the year of his death in 1999. Granted, D’amato’s name doesn’t show up anywhere in Caligula: The Untold Story. That’s because he used a pseudonym, which was a pretty common practice for Italian genre directors who were obviously trying to appeal to potential American distributors back in the day. But hey, we know who “David Hills” really is, don’t we?
Lead actor David Brandon definitely had his work cut out for him. Following up Malcolm McDowell’s performance in Caligula was a tall task and Brandon does quite well in a performance that doesn’t feel like a shameless imitation (even if the film, as a whole, is a shameless ripoff.) He actually turns in a more subdued performance than McDowell and in some ways, it’s a more ranged and effective portrayal of the mad emperor. Granted, it’s not like Brandon is Sir Laurence Olivier or anything like that, but for the material, he does a decent enough job to carry it.
You don’t have to wait long before the T&A hits the fan. We’ve already got one horrific sexual assault scene around the 12-minute mark of the film — and keep in mind, it’s hardly the last of the picture. So yeah, if that’s an automatic “nope” for some viewers, I really couldn’t blame them.
But if you stick with Caligula: The Untold Story, you’ll find a shockingly competent biopic movie. The pacing and structure of the film is quite good and the cinematography work from D’Amato is occasionally excellent. Plus the music score by Carlo Maria Cordio is pretty good, too — even if the atmosphere doesn’t always match up with what’s happening onscreen.
The movie opens with a would-be assassin getting apprehended and having … unpleasant … things done to him as punishment. From there, we get a sequence where Caligula and his pals find some Christians in the woods and … well, I’m not going to say precisely what happens to them, but rest assured, it isn’t good. Then Caligula returns to the Senate and claims the Christians did all of the mayhem themselves and the Senators ain’t buying it and they keep scheming to overthrow him. Then we get a long segment where Caligula has nightmares about formless naked women, then he pretends to die from poisoning at a big banquet and stabs a dude just because he can.
Then this movie starts getting capital “c” crazy. You kinda expect a movie about Caligula to have a couple of orgies in it and the amount of depraved stuff going on in this movie is impressive, to say the least. Like, you’ve got people juggling while engaged in carnal acts, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. And the less said about the horse, the better for everybody involved.
My favorite scene in the film is when two guys decide to have a gladiator fight to the death amidst all of this sexual excess. It’s an expertly directed scene with a neat juxtaposition of sex and violence and the editing here is just fantastic.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised by the lead actress of the film — Laura Gemser. The name may not be familiar but if you had The Movie Channel in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s you’d instantly recognize her as the titular star of Emanuelle in Bangkok, Emanuelle in America, Black Emanuelle and like half a dozen other movies with the word Emanuelle in the title. Hers is a staid performance — to put it mildly — but she’s effective enough in the thankless role as Miriam, the conflicted love interest who can’t determine whether or not she wants to assassinate Caligula in his sleep.
I feel like it’s kinda pointless to ruin down all of the graphic scenes in the film. For one, advertisers don’t like it when I do it and if you’re going into the film with merely prurient interests, it kinda spoils the fun for you. But yeah, it’s an extreme movie that would probably get an NC-17 rating today, let alone in the early 1980s. Viewer discretion, strongly advised.
The final 20 minutes of Caligula: The Untold Story almost blossom over into full-fledged supernatural horror territory. Heck, there’s one scene that almost feels like something you’d see in one of Romero’s zombie movie — it’s out there stuff, but amazingly it still manages to work within the greater context of the movie. If you’re a C-plus or higher history student you already know how the story’s going to end, but I’ll give D’amato credit for giving us a pretty unorthodox (and fairly satisfying) conclusion that doesn’t feel like a carbon copy of Caligula’s grand finale.
There’s definitely some humor to the movie, even if it was probably unintentional. Like, there’s a part where Caligula’s yes-men keep screaming “vomit, Caesar, vomit!” over and over again and Caligula’s pep talk to a eunuch — where he drops the immortal line “he’s not much, but he’s still a man” — is oddly hilarious. And since everybody’s dialogue is dubbed, you get a nice afternoon kung-fu matinee vibe to the proceedings — it’s gross and depraved, but it’s not without its moments of levity and goofiness.
Caligula: The Untold Story is obviously no match for Caligula. But it’s unique enough to forge its own identity and if you have a knack for extraordinarily problematic horror movies where everybody has really big eyebrows, you’ll be in hog heaven here. It’s not a movie for all tastes, but if you have higher class bad taste, you’ll probably enjoy this film in spite of yourself.