Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (2023)
Directed by Tinto Brass
Written by Gore Vidal
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren
Release Date August 16th, 2024
Published August 17th, 2024
With the discovery of more than 90 hours of alternate takes and never before seen footage, a team of restoration artists, under the direction of Art Historian and filmmaker Thomas Negovan, have rediscovered, repaired and reinvented Tinto Brass and Gore Vidal’s original vision for the infamous 1980 film Caligula. Released in February of 1980 under the guiding hand of sleaze merchant Bob Guccione, Caligula was a disastrous exercise in excess and a bold and failing attempt by the proprietor of Penthouse Magazine to court mainstream respect.
What Guccione got instead was a financial success akin to a car wreck you can’t look away from but you certainly never want to see again. Guccione made money on the Faustian bargain of Caligula but the respect he desperately craved was never forthcoming. Instead, director Tinto Brass, writer Gore Vidal and much of the respectable cast and crew of Caligula savaged the film and Guccione in the press for his vulgar attempt to fuse their good reputation with his desire to take pornography into the mainstream. I have no problem with pornography, but when it is put somewhere that it doesn't belong, it's more distracting and uncomfortable than it is titillating.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
