Two Roman soldiers saunter up and proceed to take the biggest of info dumps all-over the place… thus are we introduced to the atrocities Emperor Gaius “Caligula” Caesar has been committing since taking control, and thus begins 1981’s Caligulasploitation fracas, Caligula and Messalina.
Following that we get things started in the tackiest way possible as Caligula has consensual sex with his sister, before we segue into a softcore orgy… but bear with me, things are about to go off the rails in a fantastic way…
See, Caligula and Messalina is directed by none other than Bruno Mattei (Rats: Night of Terror, and Shocking Dark, to name but a few… ), and one thing ol’ Bruno digs is stock footage (I’m looking at you Hell of the Living Dead) and he uses it here to spectacularly ridiculous effect with large patches of this film being culled from 1961’s The Colossus of Rhodes, and to say it was integrated seamlessly would be a huge mother fuckin’ lie, and the threadbare sequences shot by Mattei don’t match one bit with the lifted footage, especially when characters from the footage and the new material “interact”… it’s epic in so many ways…
So Caligula eventually falls in love with wild child Messalina (Betty Roland), who amazingly enough isn’t one of his sisters, and soon we are “treated” to not only footage of donkeys’ fucking, but lifted footage of horse’s fucking from 1975’s The Beast from Walerian Borowczyk, and a murder plot against Caligula himself (not involving horses or donkeys as instruments of such… but my lord, can you imagine if it did)!
While not even remotely as relentless in it’s sleaze as Joe D’Amato’s Caligula: The Untold Story from the following year (also available on Blu-ray from Severin, which I reviewed right here), Mattei’s film has plenty of glorious nonsense on display as you can surmise by the revoltin’ ramblings above, and there is plenty of sex and violence on display… mostly sex here, but there’s more fun to be had!
For instance, there is a near catastrophic use of score that never matches the action at hand (and often cuts to different cues mid-track), and there’s a sequence involving the death of a major character that’s followed by an absolutely ridiculous “horsey dance” followed by a scene of a little person exposing himself to Messalina… which leads to a ménage a trois. Sublime.
And I shit you not, there is a character named “Macaronious” in this film. That’s some Hercules: The Legendary Journeys level nonsense right there…
As if all of the aforementioned business isn’t enough to get you to check out this Blu-ray release, Severin have also included two versions of Caligula and Messalina; an “unrated version” and a more explicit cut (the main differences won’t take you a lot of “horse sense” to figure out), as well as an informative featurette that examines the actual life of Caligula, the film’s trailer (which also makes use of that damn stock footage… it’s a 50/50 split… and has one of the best narrations I have ever heard), and the picture’s score on a separate CD.
Caligula and Messalina is exactly what you’d expect a Caligula picture from Bruno Mattei to be like; tacky, full of ridiculous scenarios, crammed with stock footage to near absurd levels, and a ton of fun to witness!
