CALIGOLA… LA STORIA MAI RACCONTATA
(“Caligula: The Untold Story”)
Production: Italy 1982
Director: Joe D’Amato
Category: Hardcore
Pornography/Peplum
Only Joe D’Amato could make a low-budget copy of Tinto Brass’ blood-soaked and sexually perverse Caligola and come up with something even more depraved; while no match in terms of production values and acting power, D’Amato’s two-hour film supersedes the original in terms of hardcore sexual excess, and at least equals it for sadistic violence. The blood-letting includes scenes of tendon-slashing and tongue mutilation, suicide and murder, decapitation, stabbings, infanticide, a fight to the death with spiked knuckle-rings, anal torture and impalement through the rectum. David Brandon plays Caligula as a delusional, bisexual sadist haunted by premonitions of assassination, who falls in love with a black slave girl (Laura Gemser) only to stab her to death in a fever dream. Gemser has two nude sex scenes of straight intercourse; the film also shows copious full-frontal nudity, rape, lesbianism, threesomes, sodomy, self-depucelation by dildo, underwater rape by dildo, masturbation, fellatio and cunnilingus. The centrepiece is a protracted hardcore orgy scene featuring transsexuals and old crones, vomiting and cum-shots, horse masturbation, and a hideously painted dwarf fellated to orgasm by two nude whores. The next Caligula film to appear in Italy would be Lorenzo Onorati’s Roma: L’Antica Chiave Dei Sensi (“Rome: Ancient Key Of The Senses”, known in English as Orgies Of Caligula or Caligula’s Slaves, 1984), the least interesting of them all despite plenty of crowd-pleasing female nudity. A Spanish production, Jaime J. Puig’s Una Virgen Para Calígula, appeared in 1982, but this was virtually a comedy, with no violence, and hardcore sex scenes only added for an export version. D’Amato later returned to the subject in one of his 90s XXX video works, Caligola: Follia Del Potere (“Caligula: The Madness Of Power”, 1997).
Posted by Venus Vex
