Caligula – the Untold Story (1980)
Woodhaven DVD (region 1)

d. Joe D'Amato; exec pr. Alexander Sussman; scr. Joe D'Amato, George Eastman; ph. Joe D'Amato; ed. George Morley; cast. David Brandon, Laura Gemser, Luciano Bartoli, Charles Borromel, Fabiola Toledo, Gabriele Tinti, Michele Soavi (92 mins modified)

The controversial and scandalous release of the Bob Guccione sponsored / Tinto Brass directed Caligula marked the biggest investment ever in hardcore pornography. 

Although the film was globally excoriated for its combination of explicit sexual perversion and extreme violence, that same mixture proved an attractive and finally irresistible lure for the burgeoning exploitation movie scene, especially in Brass’ native Italy, itself reeling from an explosion of outré cinema.  Thus, a number of existing films were either re-titled or new films quickly made in the effort to capitalize on the sheer baseness of the human condition that was the subject of Brass’ work.  But where that film had a subversive point, subsequent rip-offs were arguably sensationalistic cash-ins promoted on the dubious appeal of vivid on-screen debasement.  Such was the case with the most direct of these rip-offs, Caligula – the Untold Story, directed by veteran Italian exploitation filmmaker Joe D’Amato, whose cycle of erotic films with Laura Gemser had with Emanuelle in America turned into an arguably morally dangerous hybrid of violence and pornography.  Although there is perhaps a case to be made that D’Amato is a provocative filmmaker capable of films that combine seemingly opposed genres and that thus repeatedly push the so-called envelope, his work on Caligula – the Untold Story reveals mainly the depths of his most calculated, indifferent opportunism.

Caligula – the Untold Story is a crass, willfully degenerate version of the sensationalistic accounts of one of Ancient Rome’s most decadent rulers. 

It follows the Emperor Caligula (David Cain) as he indulges in his personal sadistic madness.  There is little purpose to his agenda and although the film begins with his decision to persecute the Christians (a subject untouched in the original Caligula and hence the “untold” story hook) this is based on personal convenience rather than ideological or religious reasoning.  Caligula intends to rape a young Christian girl who commits suicide rather than be so defiled.  The Emperor duly orders her boyfriend to be killed rather than remain a living witness but has to find a new plan when it is revealed that the boyfriend is the son of the local Roman consul.  Christians thus become convenient scapegoats for the murder and are subsequently rounded up and then tortured.  The dead woman’s friend (Laura Gemser) vows revenge and seeks to infiltrate the Imperial Palace by becoming one of Caligula’s sexual servants.  To do so, she goes through a humiliating initiation procedure in the manners of Roman lovemaking.  She soon attracts Caligula’s attention, developing it to the point where he may even love her.  However, the needs of his private palace soon dictate that he hold elaborate orgies, intending to charge extravagant admission prices to raise money.

By D’Amato’s standards, the film is something of a let-down, especially in the truncated version released on this supposedly uncut DVD. 

It is cheaply done on makeshift sets and as an assessment of the madness of absolute power has nothing to add to the original Caligula: indeed, in narrative structure, D’Amato’s film plays bland variations on key scenes from the Guccione / Brass production.  The disgraceful, style-less result lacks the dubious resonance of D’Amato’s more provocative works.  It is heartless, even within the exploitation genre, as sex is always passionless and humiliating (there is reportedly even a scene involving a woman and a horse in an uncensored version of the film, but not on this DVD version).  D’Amato’s is a loveless world where power means self-indulgence.  As true to many of his films though, the theme seems to be the collapse of morality and humanity – a theme that perhaps led to his moral indifference as a filmmaker of the worst kind of “bread and circuses” entertainment.  With little pace, structure or point, he offers a catalogue of depravities meant to demonstrate the depths of the unregulated human psyche and the perversity of Roman power.  Almost as s last resort does he seek to explore the role that Christianity has as a kind of super-ego in the evolution of human nature, insinuating but not exploring this as the eruption of a collective conscience.

There are ideas in the film concerning the nature of sexual slavery, implying that it is male desire that essentially makes men easily led by the women they seek to in turn dominate, debase and destroy as a means of regaining the power lost through their desire. 

Sexuality is, of course, power and the debasement of women thus the primary means for men to assert themselves.  There is hence tremendous irony in the film’s latter stages where it seems Caligula may have fallen in something approaching love and that his character is finally in a moral turnaround in the moments before his murder, as if he recognizes his insanity, his conscience fleetingly awakened.  The film’s most sustained theme however, such as it is, is the oddly simultaneous longing for, and fear of, immortality that D’Amato feels constitutes the irreconcilable core of Caligula’s madness – at one point he hears voices in the manner of the “to be or not to be” speech in Hamlet.  The idea that in turn emerges is that Caligula’s sadistic liberty is his affront to God rather than a means of self-deification: that absolute freedom from all forms of social, sexual and psychological restraint is the symptom of humanity’s desire to pummel divinity into moral anarchy.  Although this arguably makes Caligula a revolutionary figure, offering a parallel to Brass, D’Amato adds a peculiar irony to his ending: Christian values may have caused the Emperor to reform.

DVD DETAILS:

Vision
The visual transfer on this DVD is an absolute abomination, one of the worst token 4:3 fullscreen transfers possible and in no way an advance on the VHS that was presumably used as a master source.  Although the sets are cheaply hobbled together and the sense of color is without apparent pattern to begin with, the DVD’s color balance is truly dreadful and undifferentiated, so much so that it looks murky and smudged – in several scenes there is no difference between sky and sea line and so backgrounds look always like indistinct blurs of color.  Clarity here is shocking and little resolution is present at all.  Although there is some nudity and much sexual violence, the source print used for this DVD is not uncut.  It may be unrated but is not complete – there exist reports of far more explicit and disturbing scenes than exist here.  There are oddments, however, that do still work as uneasy spectacle – the training of women sex slaves, the torture of seemingly good Romans and the carnage when a Senator must choose to kill another or himself be killed – testifying perhaps to the atrocity of an unregulated ego.  These scenes toy irresolutely with Caligula’s madness as random or systematic.  A shot of Caligula peering at his own reflection in a pool of blood is most effective in context.  Editing rhythms in the orgy scenes seem inspired by Tinto Brass, and explicit torture scenes remain disturbing.

Sound
The sound design on this DVD transfer is as bad and undifferentiated as the visual.  Though listed in some sources as being in Dolby Digital stereo, it never feels more than mono.  And at that, it is the poorest of work, a quick DVD hack-job done by people apparently unconcerned with quality and who even hold the films they distribute (not to mention their potential customer base) in total contempt.  Leveled at a seemingly constant low-key mono-tone there is little in the way of background sound to develop any audio presence (let alone ambience) beyond voices and the odd, minor diegetic effect.  The opening voice-over adds a momentary and specious quality of historical self-importance but as a device it is soon abandoned and forgotten in a combination of muted sound and loud hiss.  All the drawbacks of VHS return to haunt this DVD transfer: inexcusable.  Sound often pops and even goes out for brief moments altogether, making the viewing experience an unintentionally disjointed one.  Dialogue and delivery are unconvincing and the film has the dispassionate aura of a cheap cash-in.  The pool scenes of sex-slave training have some audio presence and the sporadic music track is most effective in the orgy scenes where it seems to again deliberately imitate the better score in Brass’ film.  This is a shoddy transfer and should not be tolerated: it does nothing to serve or preserve the film.

Special Features

There are no special features.  It must be mentioned also that the DVD used for review had terrible DVD authoring problems, being characterized by what fans call DVD rot.  There was thus frequent pixilation, jerkiness and freezing of the image upon playback, especially in the second half.  The same problems were encountered on another Caligula-themed DVD by the same distributor, though a slightly better film, Caligula 2 – Messalina Messalina, and together are evidence of a distributor in for a quick dollar.  Even a failed exploitation film like Caligula - the Untold Story deserves better than this and may indeed be a finer and more rewarding film in its uncut form.