Guccione, a waxworks vulgarian draped in gold medallions and silk shirts unbuttoned to the navel, spared no expense in his bid to become the Cecil B. But by the mid-‘70s, his publishing empire was such a hand-over-fist moneymaking juggernaut that he began to have delusions of Tinseltown grandeur, including the dream of bankrolling the most expensive, over-the-top, and sexiest Roman epic ever captured on celluloid. The porn magnate had already helped finance a handful of major-studio productions such as Chinatown, The Longest Yard, and The Day of the Locust.
CALIGULA FULL MOVIE MALCOLM MCDOWELL MOVIE
So I began digging.Ĭaligula wasn’t Guccione’s first foray into the more legitimate precincts of the movie business. I needed to how the hell this movie came to be. Limping to the end credits of this I, Claudius-for-the-raincoat-set epic spectacular was like my own private Bataan death march. Instead, what I got was quite possibly the worst-and most unerotic-film ever made. I think what I was hoping for this time around was some sort of so-bad-it’s-good cult classic. And witnessing it again, I was actually kind of impressed that Ebert managed to stay in his seat as long as he did. It had been nearly 20 years since I’d first seen the infamous sword-and-sandal porno dumpster fire. How are you not going to throw on Caligula after reading that? So I did.
‘Caligula’ is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn. That this film is not only garbage on an artistic level, but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience. I wanted to tell them,what did I want to tell them? What I’m telling you now. That was on a Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Here’s how Ebert kicked off his review when he got back to his typewriter: ‘Caligula’ is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bob Guccione’s big-budget Ancient Rome porn extravaganza, Caligula. A film that was so inept and god-awful he had to get up and walk out of the theater. Still, even the most masochistic movie reviewer can have his or her limit. It’s 406 pages long-and according to Ebert, it merely represented the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds? Thousands? The doorstop-thickness of his essential anthology, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie offers a hint at the sheer massiveness of the number. I wouldn’t know where to even begin when it comes to tallying up how many truly shitty movies Roger Ebert had to sit through in his four-and-a-half decades as a film critic.
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