Caligula: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

CALIGULA: TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

PENTHOUSE VIDEO 155 MINUTES, $29.99 (DVD)

Now that DVD has proven itself to a receptive audience, producers are rushing to fill the stores with the same extensive backlist that made VHS such a success. As with VHS, the output is a kaleidoscope of classics, cult favorites, and junk--whatever will sell. Also showing up on the shelves are films that have been forgotten about for decades for one reason or another--such as "Caligula."

Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's scenery-chewing, censor-provoking epic melds historical melodrama with widescreen pornography, with the emphasis on the latter. Guccione took novelist Gore Vidal's screenplay and Italian director Tinto Brass' original version and shot additional scenes featuring Penthouse Pets and porn stars doing their things. The result, far ahead of its time as far as industry, audience, and legal acceptance, never made it to wide distribution and soon disappeared from sight, to reemerge two decades later in more permissive times, when viewers can watch it in their own living rooms.

Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, and Peter O'Toole prove the off-cited theorem that you can get English actors to do anything on screen as long as you spell their names right on the check. Gielgud and O'Toole at least manage to get themselves killed off--by suicide and assassination, respectively--within the first half-hour, but McDowell and Mirren brazen it out all the way through, with McDowell especially overacting, mugging, and simulating sex blithely. Meanwhile, following the theory that you can never have too many orgies, Guccione has scraped up another seven minutes of footage from the cutting room floor.

If a mad melange of "I, Claudius" and "Debbie Does Dallas" is your cup of tea, this is the video for you. "Masterpiece Theatre," though, it's not.

Reviewed by

ROBERT S. ROTHENBERG Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

COPYRIGHT 2000 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group