Caligula and Messalina

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source: Caligula's Perversions

Rome, circa 40 A. D. Depraved and deranged emperor Caligula (a spot-on wicked portrayal by Vladimir Brajovic) falls under the spell of the seductive and insatiable, but ruthlessly driven and ambitious female gladiator Messalina (well played to the lusty hilt by gorgeous brunette Betty Rowland). Meanwhile, Caligula's spiteful sister Agrippina (foxy blonde Francoise Blanchard) plots to take Messalina out. Notorious Italian schlockmeister Bruno Mattei really delivers the pleasingly trashy goods with his customary lack of taste and restraint: We've got oodles of tasty bare female flesh, hot semi-pornographic sex scenes, a deliciously debauched tone, brutal torture, bloody violence, and even a couple of scenes with animals doing the deed (!). Moreover, the copious use of obvious stock footage gives this flick a surprisingly epic sense of scope. Silvie Dezabauneix makes a nice impression as the devious Drusilla while the singular Salvatore Baccaro makes a memorable uncredited appearance as an ugly, but well-endowed stud. A sleazy treat.

One of the small slew of Roman histories which followed in the wake of Tinto Brass' critically reviled but commercially successful Caligula, Bruno Mattei's Caligula and Messalina doesn't have a great deal to add but what it does have is pretty eye-popping. Unlike Brass' monumental work, Mattei's atrocity has Caligula die about halfway through, continuing the story into the reign of Claudius until he tires of his disgraceful wife Messalina and has her put to the sword. The film is, then, more the story of Messalina than of Caligula, although you wouldn't know it from the set-up, which simply retreads the familiar Caligula story, beginning with some appallingly clunking exposition speeches, the best that can be said about which is that what they expose is then shown on screen, making them not only poor scriptwriting but staggeringly redundant. The story is enlivened by Mattei's trademark use of stock footage, which means that intermixed with the cheap and cheerless original film are crowd scenes, senate scenes and gladiatorial scenes from early 1960s peplum, including Pontius Pilate and Leone's The Colossus of Rhodes. As usual with Mattei, the stock footage stands out like a sore thumb, or in this case is like a perfect hand on which his own sore thumb has been stuck. Not content with chivvying things up in this fashion, Mattei provides us with not one but two scenes of equine congress in quick succession – the ass's milk for Messalina's bath is helped along by bringing in a long-donged mule to tup the ass, and Caligula's famous senator horse is shown in congress with a mare at the stables,; both scenes include explicit footages of the animal's sexual organs, the latter sequence intercutting footage from Borowczyk's The Beast. Both sequences are about as unnecessary as can be imagined, but they do perk the jaded interest after what has been a fairly dull first 45 minutes. After this, things get better as Caligula is killed and the story is a little bit less familiar. Messalina, now Claudius' Empress, craves nothing more than huge dick, and is serviced by her well-hung eunuch before skipping down the brothel to try the legendarily huge member of an out-of-towner client (played by the ugliest man to ever hit the screen, Salvatore Baccaro from The Beast in Heat). There's an amusing episode where the Empress feeds a lover to the lions, but the film is for the most part pretty flat, poorly acted and unimaginatively directed, so apart from the outré elements, there's little to engage, and most viewers I should think will be pretty relieved when Messalina meets her end, allowing the film to.

A laughable Italian exploitation, that uses stock footage from old sword and sandal epics. Certainly not the best example in the genre. Bruno Mattei, was indeed a prolific B-movie director (of 55 titles) and was working right up to his death until 2007.

Vincent Dawn, in case you couldn't guess, is Bruno Mattei and here, he's making one of the several Caligulasploitation movies he'd churn out in his career. If you thought, "I liked Tinto Brass' Caligula but I really wish it wasn't so highbrow," then Bruno - or Vincent - is your man. Antonio Passalia, who co-directed this and Mattei's other Romesplotation film, Nero and Poppea - An Orgy of Power, also appears in both of these movies as Cladius. But the real story revolves around Messalina (Betty Roland, who not to sound like a broken record, but also appeared in Nero and Poppea), who has one goal: to be Empress of Rome. If that takes fighting in the gladiator pits or literally blowing Claudius' mind, so be it. Meanwhile, Caligula's sister Agrippina (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl and, yes, both of these movies) sleeps with her own brother before eliminating him, all so that her son Nero can become Emperor. How will she make that move? Well, Messalina sleeps with everyone - even pulling off a surprise terzetto on her wedding night with a muscular man who is under 147 centimeters and somehow bedding a eunuch - and it comes back to haunt her when she becomes pregnant while her husband is fighting in a foreign war. Agrippina is not to be stopped in her goals. She's also a gladiator, albeit one that can do karate, and not shy when it comes to castrating her victims. As if this movie couldn't be any wilder, Mattei falls back to his tricks of, well, ripping off scenes from other movies, lifting from The Colossus of Rhodes, Pontius Pilate and The Beast. To be honest, I'm shocked that there weren't more of these Roman epics filtered through the nothing-held-back mania of Italian maniacs like Mattei. Maybe they didn't sell as well as prison, cannibal and last days of the Third Reich films.

I was interested in these cheap Italian exploitation knockoffs for one reason -- well, that would be Caligula's debaucherous life, but more specifically because I'm such a fan of Tinto Brass' unpleasant trash epic. This movie adds very little to the mystique, (redundantly) rehashing some of Caligula's exploits, then they off him about 40 minutes in. So, really, this is more of a story about his (second) cousin Messalina, who, let me tell ya, is a bigger * than Caligula ever hoped to be. One thing I found misleading, was that the Caligula and Messalina Blu-ray included an X-rated cut, just like Brass' did. So, 6 extra minutes of, uh, I dunno, God-knows-what. They ramp up the incest. The vast majority of the sex is simulated, and the countless orgy sequences are done in this super wide screen. One thing I did notice on screen, were a whole lot of shots with, well, an unpleasant part of the male anatomy. Which no one wants to see! Worse still, what IS graphic is not one, but TWO scenes of animals mating. Yikes. Messalina's portion of the story is one of betrayal, uprising, sleeping with anything with a pulse, so much distant nudity that you become immune to it, and who's going to outstab everyone else to become empress. If you're expecting anything on par with Brass' film (real sex, outrageous performances, elaborate sets, elaborate medieval decapitating devices, distasteful violence, etc. Etc.), I think "sorely disappointed" is all you'll be left with.

Okay its Caligula we need no story and very little dialog. It needed more caligulating and less talk, less action; okay its about Caligula. Show the beastiality that was done in the Colosseum, show more good Caligula scenes like in the actual Caligula movie with McDowell. Show it people!

"Caligula and Messalina", obviously made to cash in on the dispiriting success of the notorious "Caligula", is not quite as bad as that movie, which is faint praise indeed. It is, however, almost painfully boring: proof, if any were required, that wall-to-wall sex and nudity can't prevent a movie from becoming soporific. The plot is, allegedly, about the Roman emperor Caligula, Messalina (the most notorious woman in Roman history), Agrippina (her rival), and the emperor Claudius. The movie has very little dialogue, and practically no exposition, so if you don't go in knowing a fair bit about these classical figures, you'll be left in the dark for much of the movie's run-time. Though, of course, "Caligula and Messalina" isn't a historical picture. It's an exploitation movie. So, there are a lot of ridiculous added details, such as Messalina first getting Caligula's attention by fighting in the colosseum. Women didn't fight in the colosseum anyway, but even if they had, I'm pretty sure a blood-relative of the current emperor would never have found her way there. The movie ignores the fact that Messalina was related to Caligula and just gives you this lame introduction for her character, which could have worked a bit better if it had been directed with some kind of skill. This is a motif throughout the whole film, in fact, and is part of the reason why it's so boring. Capable filmmakers shoot establishing shots of scenes that are framed so that we can see everything we need to see. The camera then provides close-ups of actors or action or significant details to make us feel involved in the action. "Caligula and Messalina" does the first part of this, and just seems to leave it at that. The camera is always too far away. If the director can't get us involved in the story, he could at least give us a good look at the sex and nudity the movie is chock full of, but alas, we don't get that either. The distance between the camera and the actors, and the generally poor camera angles, leaves most of the nudity hard to make out. I'm pretty sure that if you are unfortunate enough to watch this movie, there's only one thing about it you will remember, and that is the two scenes of horses mating. One was more than enough, but "Caligula and Messalina" inexplicably includes two such scenes. Was Bruno Mattei, the filmmaker, actually trying to cause harm to his audience by making us watch this?