Wednesday, September 7, 2011

The Progressive Cinema Scorecard for Caligula:
  • WHAT?!? Netflix doesn't have the uncut 156-minute version on the instant queue? Where's my extra 15 minutes of gratuitous hardcore sex? = -200pts
  • Screenplay by Gore Vidal. = +50pts
  • Oh, wait. Based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal. = -100pts
  • Casting Alex from A Clockwork Orange as Rome's batshit craziest emperor. = +50pts
  • Tantalizing us with hot '70s nudity in the opening scene, only to reveal that the parties concerned are brother and sister. = -20pts
  • Miles of dangling chain gang slave wang. = +8pts
  • Peter O'Toole: the drunken, paranoid, syphilitic grandfather we never had. = +30pts
  • Emperor Tiberius's pleasure grotto looks like something out of an Hieronymus Bosch painting. = + 25pts
  • Holy shit! Is that a human centipede on Tiberius's stairs? = +20pts
  • Drowning the stuck-up butler from Arthur in a glass bathtub. = +10pts
  • So, wait, no one's going to... I don't know... remove the the thing you used to strangle the emperor from around his neck before letting everyone know that he's dead?  No? Okay, I guess you guys know what you're doing. = -17pts
  • Young, partially nude Helen Mirren. = +100pts
  • A doomsday machine with rotating death blades decapitating prisoners buried up to their necks in the floor of the Colosseum? Why the hell not! = +200pts
  • The constant, haunting presence of Malcom McDowell's supple, hairless ass cheeks. = -30pts
  • Caligula delivers the most enthusiastic thumbs-up in cinematic history following Caesonias...er..."erotic" dance. = +47pts
  •  Thank God they've captured the ancient Roman tradition of giving birth upright and cruciform for an audience of hundreds. Just like I always read about in my history texts. = +50pts
  • Watching Caligula clumisily dragging his sister's naked corpse up the steps to a statue of Isis and knowing that somehow this scene was supposed to inspire pathos instead of snorting laughter. = -25pts
  • Wow. I don't even know how to begin to describe what's going on here. So we've got an imperial orgy including all the wives and daughters of the senate, but the whole scene takes place in a land-bound ivory Roman galley, complete with oarsmen and a formation of Roman legionaries sashaying around it in a choreographed dance number. = +50pts
  • Watching the re-enactment of Caligula's "conquest" of Britain. I'm glad the film makers captured the classic Roman strategy of sending their naked soldiers into battle first. You know, to weird the enemy out. = +13pts
  • Apparently the password to enter the royal palace was "scrotum." = +10pts
  • Gross historical inaccuracy. = -148pts
  • Gross historical inaccuracy: = +296pts
Progressive Cinema Scorecard Total: +419

Final Note: An A-list Hollywood cast, hopelessly elaborate '70s art deco Roman sets, and a screenplay that unfolds as though it were written by someone who had read a wikipedia article on ancient Rome while huffing paint out of a sack made of mescaline. Even without the fifteen minutes of completely unnecessary and totally unsimulated sexual perversion, there's more than enough jaw-dropping insanity in this film to make Scorecard history.

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