Caligola: Follia del potere

The 1990s spelled the end for the Italian horror/exploitation industry. With only a handful of horror films being released around 1990-92, all of which were a serious drop in quality compared to what was being produced during the 70s and 80s. The budgets were smaller, live audio was used rather than dubbing all the sounds and dialogue in post-production, the casts featured less recognized Italian, and English speaking stars, usually opting for inexperienced actors who, combined with the struggles of reading scripts poorly translated from Italian into English, and working with directors and crews who could hardly speak English, gave very awkward, wooden performances, often riddled with line flubs or bad deliveries of dialogue which, as you'd expect, flew completely over the director's heads; and the effects and props used were usually of a very poor quality. The last days of the Italian exploitation industry were dark days indeed, bringing us such cinematic train wrecks as Frankenstein 2000 (Return from Death), Quest for the Mighty Sword (Ator III: The Hobgoblin), Black Demons (Demoni 3), Shocking Dark (Terminator 2), Metamorphosis (Re-Animator 2), Crawlers (Troll 3), Beyond Darkness (La Casa 5), and of course, the greatest bad movie of them all, Troll 2 (Troll 2).

These films, directed by the Italian horror regulars in the industry like Joe D'Amato, Umberto Lenzi, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, and even the Big Ape himself, George Eastman, are seldom looked at as underrated gems or misunderstood visions. They are either considered so bad they are bad, or so bad they are good.

As you can imagine, after a string of disastrous films from this period and the increasing difficulty to find financing for any future horror films, the Italian horror industry closed its doors and the masters of sleaze and cheese found themselves either retiring, ala Lenzi, becoming TV directors in Italy, ala Fragasso, directing cheap DTV horror films, ala Mattei, or in Joe D'Amato's case, moving on to directing hardcore/softcore pornography, which leads us to the film in question.

Caligola: Follia del potere (a sly reference to the original working title for D'Amato's 1981 exploitation film "Caligula: The Untold Story") is one of the many porno's that the king of sleaze produced throughout the course of the 90s.

The "plot", as you'd expect from a porno, is paper thin, border lining on non-existent. We simply see Caligula indulging in the sinful delights that one that can freely partake in when they are the Emperor of Rome, which in this film's case is, well, you guessed it: sex, sex and more sex. And when the Emperor Gaius Caligula isn't experiencing the pleasures of a woman, it's one of his guards, or friends, or the servants, etc.

The sex scenes are decently shot and acted. In terms of filming, the shots are in focus, you see what you expect to see, and in terms of acting, you're not going to get an Oscar worthy performance but if the actors and actresses can read their lines and screw in a mostly convincing manner, they're doing their jobs and that's exactly what the cast in this film do, they say the lines when they need to and they screw with gusto to either an orchestral score or a smooth synth score, depending on the version. Speaking of which, in the hardcore version, there's plenty of graphic depictions of sexual acts (it's called hardcore for a reason), while in the softcore version, the film will fade away just as any image of penetration is about to be seen, showing only a quick few second glimpse of the act, before it lingers on either the man or the woman at the peak of an orgasm. The softcore version also incorporates stock footage from D'Amato's earlier Caligula endeavor to add a little flavor, I assume in order to compensate for its own sex scenes having to be watered down considerably.

The sets and locations used are serviceable. Naturally there aren't any big exterior shots to show the grand scale of Ancient Rome; simply just a throne room, and some chambers in Caligula's palace, and the odd outdoor shot in a field as Caligula rides (not that kind of riding, thank goodness) his horse.

If you can track down a copy, be it the softcore or hardcore version, it's worth a watch as a curio for D'Amato fans who want to see as many of the maestro's films that he made throughout his prolific career, just don't go in expecting anything with a demented or creative spark along the lines of his earlier work, like Caligula: The Untold Story, or Beyond the Darkness. Those days were long gone by 1997; instead D'Amato is in pure auto-pilot mode in terms of direction. The set and characters in the scene are established, the cast might exchange a few lines, and then they have sex while the camera lingers on them in a static shot, eventually there's a transition to a different angle, usually a close-up of moaning, or genitalia, then back to the master shot, rinse and repeat until the climax, then move on to the next scene. No fancy lighting (I doubt they could afford it) or kinky foreplay (they just get straight business as soon as the porn music kicks in), Pretty standard stuff. If you're a watcher of porn, you might get something out of the film, or you might not. If you can't find the film, don't fret, you're not really missing out on anything groundbreaking or mind-blowing, just a competently made sex film.