Retrospective: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

Once in a while, a film maimed by some Hollywood studio gets restored to its true form, and we learn it was always one of the great movies of its time. Touch of Evil and Once Upon a Time in America turned out to be masterpieces when some friendly necromancers brought them back from the grave. Then there's Caligula, which recently had Tinto Brass' scenes restored and lost the porn inserts inflicted on it by Bob Guccione, and tragically turns out to still be a dogshit movie.

Caligula isn't an incompetent movie. Tinto Brass absolutely makes the movie he set out to direct. The art design is some of the finest in 20th Century cinema. And McDowell, Mirren, and Gielgud all do fine, even if they're literally upstaged by the set design. But Caligula takes the mythology of one of Rome's most travestied emperors and makes it an utterly tedious bit of torture porn.

The first 30-odd minutes of the movie are promising. There's something fun about watching a caricatured, debauched portrait of the early Roman Empire. Peter O'Toole is, frankly, hamming it up more than Gary Oldman ever has, and the scenes on Capri aren't exactly long on depth, but they're some of the few dramatic moments in the movie. We get a glimpse of the fascinating historical reality that Tiberius created Caligula, and an interesting psychological portrait of a Richard III-esque Caligula with an inferiority complex and more misanthropy than a 4chan user. For a minute, this looks like a relatively fun bit of horrible exploitation cinema, especially when Tiberius' men block a man's urethra, force him to drink an entire jar of wine, and then puncture his stomach with a sword, releasing gallons of blood and wine from his body.

Then it starts to get old. It turns out the movie really has nothing to observe except "gee, wasn't Rome awful?" It stops being gleefully awful and gets old fast. After Caligula brutally rapes a couple at their wedding, the depravity gets repetitive. I didn't even blink when the Praetorian Guard smashed a baby's skull on marble stairs. Two hours of this would have been taxing. Three hours is just boring.