The TSL Grindhouse: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (dir by Tinto Brass)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

How many cuts do we need of a bad movie?

Caligula is a film with a long and storied history. In the mid-1970s, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione wanted to follow the lead of his rival, Hugh Hefner, and get into the movie business. His plan was to make an explicit adult film with high production values, one that could be sold as a mainstream feature film. He decided that the infamously decadent Roman Emperor Caligula would be the subject of his film. In order to give the project some gravitas, he accepted scripts from both Lina Wertmuller and Gore Vidal. Ultimately, he chose to go with Vidal’s script because Vidal’s name had more cultural cachet than Wertmuller’s. It certainly wasn’t because he liked Vidal’s script, which Vidal later said featured a lot of gay sex but only one scene of heterosexual coupling.

With the promise that Caligula would be a classy production that would push the boundaries of cinematic sex without actually being pornographic, Guccione was able to bring together a truly impressive cast of actors. Malcolm McDowell agreed to play Caligula. Helen Mirren was cast as Caligula’s wife, Caesonia. John Gielgud took on the role of Nerva the philosopher while Peter O’Toole was cast as the diseased Emperor Tiberius. Guccione offered directing duties to John Huston and Lina Wertmuller. In the end, no matter how much money he was willing to spend or how distinguished a cast he had assembled, Guccione could not find a prominent, mainstream director who was willing to work with him. Guccione ended up hiring a director he knew little about, an Italian arthouse filmmaker named Tinto Brass.

Brass proceeded to rewrite Vidal’s script. Brass’s version of the film featured more sex and less politics. Guccione was happy about that until he discovered that Brass’s plan was to direct the sex scenes to be grotesque and disturbing. To his horror, Guccione discovered that Brass was essentially parodying the type of film that Guccione wanted him to direct. Even when Guccione insisted that the latest “Penthouse pets” be cast in the film, Brass tried to keep them in the background. As Guccione’s demands grew, Brass responded by refusing to emphasize the ornate and very expensive sets that Guccione had paid to have created. A working ship was built but Brass reportedly chose to put it in a small warehouse so that there would never be room to get a full shot of it. Guccione responded by taking the film away in post-production and inserting several hardcore sex scenes, which upset the members of the cast who did not sign on to appear in a pornographic film.

As for the film itself, it must be said that Caligula is probably one of the most historically accurate portrayals of ancient Rome. The city was said to be a mix of dirty streets and ornate palaces and Caligula certainly captured the mix of beauty and sordid decadence that was the Roman Empire. The film’s plot actually sticks very closely to what was written about Caligula by Roman historians like Suetonius. Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell both give strong performances, even if McDowell later claimed the film ruined his career by typecasting him as a perverse villain. Peter O’Toole is memorably grotesque as Tiberius. Exploitation vets John Steiner and Teresa Ann Savoy also make an impression in their roles and one gets the feeling that they both understood what type of film they were appearing in, even if the bigger names in the cast did not. There are moments of shocking grandeur and visual beauty to be found in Caligula and also moments of such total ugliness that they are difficult to watch. In many ways, Caligula is what Guccione wanted. It’s a big, expensive film that tests boundaries and features explicit sex.

But, Good God, is it ever boring! Seriously, the scene where Caligula visits Tiberius in Capri goes on forever. Despite McDowell’s strong performance, Caligula is not a particularly compelling character. He becomes emperor and then he goes mad. For over two hours, Caligula does one terrible thing after another and there’s only so long that you can watch it before you just want someone to hurry up and kill him. The film suggests that Caligula was rebelling against the Roman establishment but, in the end, who cares? He kills his friends. He has sex with his sister. In the film’s most disturbing scene, he rapes a bride and then fists the groom. It just goes on and on and it gets old pretty quickly.

Still, there’s always been a lot of debate over whether or not it would be possible to make Caligula into a good film. Bob Guccione claimed that he saved the film. Tinto Brass disagreed and his director’s cut, which takes out Guccione’s hardcore inserts, is considerably better-paced than the Guccione version but the nonstop ugliness still gets rather boring.

That brings us to the latest version of Caligula, the Ultimate Cut. Assembled without the input of Tinto Brass or the deceased Bob Guccione, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut played at Cannes in 2023 and was given a limited release by Drafthouse Films in 2024. It was largely assembled out of unused footage and alternate takes. I’ve read that not a single fame from the original version of Caligula is in The Ultimate Cut but I don’t think that’s quite true. (The scene with the giant beheading machine appears to be the same footage that appeared in the original version.) Caligula: The Ultimate Cut removes all of Guccione’s hardcore footage but it also downplays a lot of Brass’s directorial flourishes as well. Instead, The Ultimate Cut is said to much more closely follow Gore Vidal’s vision of the film.

Is the Ultimate Cut any good? It definitely looks better than the previous version of Caligula. The restoration makes Rome into a very colorful city. There’s a bit more humor to McDowell’s performance in the Ultimate Cut. While his version of Caligula still becomes a monster (and the wedding rape is still included in the film), he starts out as a clown whose mission is to humiliate the Roman establishment in much the same way that Tiberius used to humiliate him. In The Ultimate Cut, Caligula is much more of an anarchist. At the same time, the Ultimate Cut features a bit less of John Steiner as the duplicitous Longinus and that’s a shame because Steiner’s performance was one of the best in the original version. As well, Helen Mirren’s performance is stronger in the original version than in The Ultimate Cut. The alternate takes that were used in The Ultimate Cut often seem to favor McDowell over Mirren.

That said, The Ultimate Cut is still a bit of an endurance test. Caligula’s meeting with Tiberius still goes on forever and the nonstop evil of his reign still gets a bit dull after a while. It turns out that Caligula the Anarchist is no more compelling than Caligula the Madman. Brass and even Guccione may have had a point with the original version of Caligula. Caligula is a film that requires a truly sordid and shameless sensibility to be interesting.

In the end, it’s hard not to feel that all of this could have been avoided if Gemellus had been named emperor.

The Films of Dario Argento: Tenebrae

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A few Octobers ago, I got the bright idea to try to review all of Dario Argento’s films over the course of TSL’s annual horrorthon. Unfortunately, I got that idea on September 29th, two days before the start of Horrorthon. I managed to make my way through Inferno until I had to temporarily abandon the project to focus on everything else that was going on that month. However, since I’m not the type to fully give up on anything, I figured this would be the great year to finish up my Argento reviews.

Following the commercial failure of Inferno, a disillusioned Dario Argento returned to Rome. His bad experience with 20th Century Fox had soured Argento on continuing to work with Hollywood and his struggles to film Inferno (as well as his increasingly strained relationship with girlfriend Daria Nicolodi) left him with little desire to continue The Three Mothers trilogy. Instead, he focused on a new idea, one that was inspired by his own experience with an obsessed fan who had left vaguely threatening messages for him when he was in New York. Released in 1982, Tenebrae was Argento’s return to the giallo genre and it would turn out to be a very triumphant return, even if in, typical Argento fashion, it would take a few years for many people to realize just how triumphant.

Argento himself claimed that, while the film was certainly a giallo, it was also his first stab at science fiction. In an interview that appeared in Cinefantastique, Argento said that the film was meant to take place a few years in the future, after some sort of calamity had occurred that has greatly reduced the world’s population. Interestingly, Argento said that the survivors were largely from the upper class and that none of them wanted to talk about or remember what had happened.

Is the science fiction element actually present in this film? I think it is, though perhaps only because I’ve specifically looked for it. Rome, as portrayed in Tenebrae, is a city that is full of sleek but impersonal buildings, the type that would have been recently built by a wealthy society that was unsure of what it believed. Argento specifically avoids filming any scene near any historical landmarks, suggesting all of the evidence of Rome’s former greatness has been wiped out.

Perhaps the most futuristic element of the film (and the most prophetic) is that no one really seems to have a connection with anyone else. The crowd scenes in Tenebrae aren’t really that crowded, even the ones that take place in what should be a busy airport. (In many ways, the film’s portrayal of a Rome that is both busy but strangely empty brings to mind Jean Rollin’s portrayal of Paris in The Night of the Hunted.) Even when we see people socialize, there seems to be an invisible barrier between them, as if they don’t want to run the risk of getting too close to each other. When one character is fatally stabbed while out in public, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the murder is that so many people just walk away, as if they’ve been conditioned to ignore anything unpleasant. The only thing that prevents this scene from feeling like a vision of 2023 is that there aren’t a bunch of people filming the victim’s final moments on their phone.

The film opens with a sequence that, as a former teen shoplifter, left me feeling disturbed. Elisa Manni (Ania Pieroni, who played The Mother of Tears in Inferno and the enigmatic housekeeper in Fulci’s The House By The Cemetery) is a shoplifter who gets caught trying to steal the latest book by thriller novelist Peter Neal. After being released, the carefree Elisa walks back to her home and, after being menaced by both a barking dog and a pervy old man, Elisa arrives in the safety of her house, starts to undress, and is promptly attacked by a black-gloved killer who slashes her neck and stuffs pages of Neal’s book into her mouth. It’s not just the murder that makes this scene disturbing but also the fact that the killer was somehow waiting for Elisa in her house, establishing that this is a world where the safety of even a locked door is an illusion.

Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), who we first see riding his bicycle in New York, has come to Italy to promote his latest book, Tenebrae. He arrives in Rome with his manager, Bullmer (John Saxon, giving a likable performance) and his assistant, Anne (Daria Nicolodi). Confident to the point of arrogance, Peter is a pro at dismissing claims that his books are violent and misogynistic but even he is taken aback when an old friend of his, the journalist Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), suggests that Tenebrae might inspire violence.

Peter Neal is a celebrity and a pretty obvious stand-in for Argento and everyone in the film is obsessed with him. His ex-fiancée, Jane (Victoria Lario), has followed Peter to Rome, intent on getting some sort of revenge for the way that he treated her while they were together. (Daria Nicolodi felt the vindictive and unstable Jane was based on her, which was another thing that strained her notoriously volatile relationship with Dario.) Peter’ young assistant, Gianni (Christian Borromeo, of Deodato’s The House on the Edge of the Park and Fulci’s Murderrock) hero worships him. The puritanical talk show host, Christiano Berti (John Steiner), wants to interview Peter about the morality of his books. And the killer, whoever they may be, is leaving letters for Peter, informing him that his book have inspired the killer’s crimes. Detective Germani (Spaghetti western star Giuliano Gemma) is investigating the letters and he is an admitted fan of Peter Neal’s novels but, somewhat alarmingly, he mentions that he’s never able to guess the killer’s identity.

Argento’s camera restlessly prowls his futuristic Rome while Goblin’s music booms on the soundtrack as the people in Peter Neal’s life are murdered by a killer wearing black gloves and carrying a straight razor. The murder scenes feature some of Argento’s best work, directed in such a ruthless and relentless manner that we understand the killer’s determination without having to see their face. This is a film of elaborate set pieces and, as if in direct response to 20th Century Fox’s attempts to control his work on Inferno, Argento is eager to show what he can do when left alone. The film is remembered for the sequence where the camera glides over the exterior of an apartment building while the killer stalks the inhabitants but, for me, the scariest scene is when poor Maria (Lara Wendel), the daughter of Neal’s landlord, finds herself being chased straight into the killer’s lair by a very viscous Doberman.

When the film does slow down, it’s for flashbacks to a beach and acts of sexual violence performed by and against an enigmatic woman (who is played by transgender performer, Eva Robbins). The beach flashbacks unfold in a hazy, dream-like manner and they leave us to wonder if what we’re watching is real or if it’s just a fantasy. If the “modern” scenes feature Argento at his most energetic, the beach scenes feature Argento at his most enigmatic.

Daria Nicolodi often said that she considered her final scene in this film to be Argento’s greatest act of cruelty to her. Coming across the killer’s final tableaux and discovering the truth about who the killer is, Anne stands in the rain and screams over and over again. Nicolodi apparently felt that Argento required her to stand there soaked and screaming in order to punish her for having worked (with Tenebrae co-star John Steiner) on Mario Bava’s Shock, instead of having accepted a supporting role in Suspiria.

Whatever personal motives may have been involved in the decision, I think Nicolodi’s screaming is one of the most powerful moments to be found in Tenebrae. It’s certainly the most human moment because I think anyone with a soul would scream upon learning the truth of what has been happening in Rome. Every assumption that Anne had has been overturned. Who wouldn’t scream? Continuing with Argento’s claim that the film was about a world where people no longer discuss the terrible things that have happened, Anne’s screams are the most human part of the movie.

Tenebrae is the last of Agento’s truly great and flawless films. Of course, in usual Argento fashion, it was not treated well in the States, where it was initially released in a heavily edited version and with a terrible title (Unsane, under which it can still be found in certain Mill Creek box sets). But Tenebrae has since been rediscovered and today stands as one of Argento’s greatest triumphs.