“Werb.” [Hank Werba], Variety, Wednesday, 21 November 1979, p 24:

There are two primary cases of mental sickness in this costly, litigation-ridden porno spectacle—one is the title character, Caligula; the other is Giovanni Tinto Brass, the creative spirit behind this moral holocaust.... Any comment on political power is pure pretext for the basic dual design of degrading humanity and elongating ad nauseam his pocketbook illustrations of sexual fantasies. Brass tries wherever possible to make horror and lechery inseparable.... Style and obsessions go hand in hand. Brass is out to flaunt every last gruesome and lech detail in the spectator’s face. He spares no one. Plebes, patricians, politicians—anything with human brain matter on two feet—are all associated in his mind with an eternal gut animalism in which human nature is only a vile or dirty joke.... Et tu, Tinto.

Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 10 February 1980, pp 17, 26:

Mr. Guccione may be on to something, though it’s not very profound. There was, admittedly, little of real social or historical value in the kind of teasing movies De Mille made, though they had the saving grace of being spectacular, romantic and sexy while selling piety. The explicit sex scenes in “Caligula” have the unexpected effect of inhibiting the imagination, which De Mille’s movies, no matter how florid, always provoked.

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, 23 February 1980, p 24:

Where Guccione has not pioneered, is just keeping up to the mark, is in violence. Penises get lopped and displayed, as do heads—neither act novel by now. And violence is shown to be sexually exciting to Roman viewers. Spears and swords are shoved into bellies, and a good time is had by all except the recipients. Not exactly the same but also made agony-as-spectator-sport is the birth of a child. Neither the violence nor the few good performances nor the points of social interest keep this film from its foreseeable tedium, chiefly because it strains to incessantly to be untedious. It begins so high, as actors say, that it has no place to go, though it keeps trying for two and a half hours. Fellini-Satyricon was obviously the visual model for Caligula. FS has nothing much more in it than its visual qualities, but they are the work of a master image-maker. All that Caligula does is keep an eye on his eye.

New York, 25 February 1980, p 61:

One searches in vain for the ghost of a theme or even a plot; what animates this movie instead is the yearning felt by all dedicated pornographers, from Sade to the present, for the one perfect, exquisite defilement, the ultimate obscenity—to the enactment of which this movie devotes many minutes of clumsy, pathetic, and disgusting hard labor.

David Ansen, Newsweek, 25 February 1980, p 76:

...a two-and-one-half-hour cavalcade of depravity that seems to have been photographed through a tub of Vaseline.... The problem of wedding historical pageantry to prolonged, explicit sexual activity soon becomes apparent. The mind disengages from the plot and lingers on the flesh.... If this sounds inviting, be warned that the myriad disembowelments, decapitations and castrations are anything but fun to watch and that the sheer length and repetitiveness of it all induces a kind of narcosis.

Judy Stone, San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, 31 March 1980, p 47:

“Caligula,” a dirty movie about a nutty Roman Emperor, opens pretentiously.... Movies like this could make people give up sex for Lent, at least, and cancel their subscriptions to Penthouse.... If “Caligula” weren’t so disgusting, it would be funny. It often is, but I don’t think the humor is intentional.

Gary Arnold, The Washington Post, 31 March 1980, pp B1, B11:

Bob Guccione’s miserable cinematic toga party, “Caligula,” is a profligate, overpriced reenactment of the brief reign... of Rome’s most degenerate emperor. By and large it is an appalling bore.... The crucial question for potential suckers is whether five or six minutes of hard-core sex is worth the remaining two hours and 30 minutes of inert costume melodrama, “relieved” only by the occasional graphic atrocity. ...The sensational footage would recommend itself almost exclusively to connoisseurs of the morbid: disemboweling, beheading, castration, a gallery of naked freaks, torture, a little necrophilia, a little urolagnia, a vomiting scene in close-up and a slow-motion infanticide by head-bashing ad nauseam.... “Caligula” is such a mucky, distasteful melange of eroticism, brutality and pageantry that it’s difficult to believe any script... ever existed.

Jeffrey Wells, Films in Review, April 1980, pp 244–245:

It contains scenes of political intrigue, ritualized slaughter, mass group-gropes and a host of perversions from incest to bestiality right on down the line. While there are some passages that are genuinely attractive and erotic, mostly the accent is on lechery, cruelty, excess.

Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1980, sec. VI, p 3:

Before you plunk down a whopping record-setting $7.50 for admission be advised that the film is two hours and 35 minutes of grisly tedium, relieved only by some unintentionally funny dialogue. The film ostensibly charts the descent into madness of Gaius Caligula, the fourth Roman emperor whose name is synonymous with cruel tyranny, but in fact the telling of his story is but a pretext to wallow in Roman decadence with a heavy, heavy emphasis on the sadistic, degrading and humiliating. The result is a film that shows us everything, yet its X-type orgies are far more frequently depressing than they are genuinely erotic.

Rena Andrews, The Denver Post, Wednesday, 16 July 1980:

If censors think the orgies in “Caligula” or the violence or the gore or any combination of the above are likely to turn on the public, they should turn in their censorial scissors. “Caligula” should have been left alone to die of its own incompetence, impotence, artlessness, ineptness and total inability to present even a semblance of love or eros.... If anything, this X-type movie should prove deadening to the senses and once initial curiosity dies and if no one tries to ban it, “Caligula” should fade into well-deserved oblivion.

Siskel and Ebert, Sneak Previews, PBS, ca. November 30, 1980:

Another reprehensible film this year was the Penthouse production of Caligula.... Caligula isn’t just artistically bad, it’s also offensive in its gratuitous scenes of torture and perversion. This movie makes a real specialty out of castrations, disembowelments, crucifixions, and other forms of torture that the camera lingers over and lingers over and what a piece of trash.... This movie seems to me to be after that dream, that unattainable dream, that has been around ever since porno came in in the sixties: They’ve always wanted to make a hardcore movie that would make millions of dollars at the boxoffice and be artistically respectable. And this movie is hardcore all right, but it’s not artistically respectable and it didn’t make millions.

And now for excerpts from my favorite of all the reviews, and the only one that was even half-way perceptive: Oswyn Murray, “Commentary :  Curiosa and curiosa,” The [London] Times Literary Supplement, 28 November 1980, p 1359:

Perhaps the most neglected aspect of the classical tradition is the pornographic. In itself the idea of the obscene is certainly widespread and possibly universal in advanced societies.... Rape and nudity have remained the two central themes of art history, both justified by the study of the classics, although the former is not in fact a particularly prominent motif in ancient myth, and in true classical art the women are normally clothed ;  the largest filing cabinet in the iconographic index of the Warburg Institute is devoted to “Zeus, Loves of”. More reasonably, that obvious sexual counter-culture, homosexuality, was virtually synonymous with Hellenism in certain late-Victorian circles. Luxury editions of the dubious classics have been a mainstay of the European book trade for centuries ;  no gentleman’s library was complete without them....

The latest contribution to this great tradition is Caligula, the Film from the well-known Book, Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. Now Suetonius was a dirty-minded man, as is shown by the many editions of his works :  he lost his job as Hadrian’s private secretary for monkey business with the emperor’s wife. His lives of the grammarians suggest that ancient schoolmasters gave a lot of their lessons in bed, and one does not go to his lives of the poets for information about poetry :  Virgil, of course, was homosexual, and Horace distinctly given to orgies. The Lives of the Caesars are not mainly about politics, which is probably as well, since in style and mental capacity Suetonius has been unfavourably compared with William Hickey. Of the twelve biographies, the Caligula is the most rancid, and rancid is the word which best describes Bob Guccione’s film. It is typical of its genre, an expensive leather-tooled cover promising delights that are not delivered.

The Oscar for misapplied skills must go to Gore Vidal, who with his usual slick efficiency has produced a screenplay only too faithful to both the letter and the spirit of the Master’s text—with the unfortunate result that the film is thereby precluded from having any serious message, such as that power corrupts or that the fantasies of the Italian male are limited. The classical aficionado will derive pleasure from the recognition of the visual equivalents of Caligula’s recorded wit :  “Let them hate as long as they fear”, “If only the Roman people had one neck”, “Make him feel that he is dying”, and so on. But beyond this somewhat restricted circle the film is not likely to have much appeal :  on what was presumably a typical night, about a third of the audience left before the end from sheer boredom.

The Oscar for this effect must go to the producer Bob Guccione and his untalented team of playmates. Essentially the problem is a failure of imagination :  Guccione himself is no arbiter of elegance, and is clearly incapable of running even the decent provincial orgies they expect in Londinium or Novum Eberacum ;  and his inflated cast show a distinct lack of enthusiasm for their private parts. Caligula’s court brothel of senatorial ladies is especially disappointing, but the actors in general are given to despairing winks at the camera, as they join with the audience in recognizing the hopelessness of the producer’s case. Visually the film owes much to Alma-Tadema and Lord Leighton, the Edwardian fantasists of Mr Pooter’s orgies. Other scenes use the iconography of the commercial. We begin with a deodorant advertisement (boy chases diaphanous girl through dappled glades) ;  and there is also one for White Horse whisky, as Caligula is discovered in bed with Incitatus, under the not-unreasonable belief that the horse is his sister. Just occasionally one recognizes pale reflections of Fellini’s Satyricon, which serve only to increase one’s respect for that vital and imaginative masterpiece ;  it seems to have taught the director merely the trick of filming in infrared with cameramen in the last stages of delirium tremens.

One endearing characteristic the film does have, along with much art pornography, is an inability to cope with the natural recalcitrance of human flesh. The wrong bits of somebody are always getting in the way, until finally, in a scene intended to arouse necrophiliac fantasies, Caligula picks up his dead sister, and we do in fact hold our breath. It is, of course, extremely difficult to grasp the naked human form in the floppy state except with a fireman’s lift, which is not the normal hold for those contemplating incest. Can he make it ?  Will he drop her, or do himself an injury ?  There is a sigh of relief as he gives up and lets her slide to the floor. In short, the violence is tomato ketchup and the sex is centre page....

Rolling Stone, 10 December 1981, p 61:

There’s no escalation in sexual or violent shock effects as the film goes on—in this movie, not only does absolute power corrupt absolutely, it also corrupts immediately.

And finally, another rare piece of perceptive writing on the film, not from a review, but from a book: R T Witcombe, The New Italian Cinema: Studies in Dance and Despair (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), p 274:

The bastardized Caligula, minus Gore Vidal’s screenplay and Brass’ director credits, opened in London in 1980 in a version containing yet another fourteen minutes of edits. Reviews were predictably hostile, for this bland and rudderless movie lacks all coherence, though the residues of Brass’ original abstractions about the absurdity of power still cling to its gunwales. Occasionally, in the sombre photography, the use of deep-field composition and the sinuous crane shots, one can discern traces of Brass’ distinctive calligraphy, but the Lui/Guccione ‘inserts’ prove to be joyless soft pornography introduced by a visual device that appears to be a shameless Casanova crib—the voyeuristic eye at the fresco spyhole.

Caligula, in this form, is not a film worth more than passing comparison with those Italian epics of the same period it most resembles, Casanova or Salò. It is filmed erotic pantomime which, in Guccione’s hands, seems curiously anxious about those aspects of life towards which its characters feign nonchalance—casual sex, indiscriminate power and, above all, the death instinct—the pornographer’s trinity of compulsions, one might say.