1. Caligula
Caligula was a gift from a friend - let's just call him 'Alfie' - who is a true Bad Cinema Connoisseur. And 'Alfie' really pulled out all the stops with this one. I didn't even get the edited version of
Caligula - nope, the 3 disc box set I was given came complete with the utterly unhinged unedited version. The version where there's scenes of actual borking, and gore as far as the eye can see. A brief history of
Caligula. It was supposed to be a historical epic, the script written by Gore Vidal, and starring the likes of Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud. But then there was a beef between Vidal and the director, Tinto Brass (cool name, bruh). And then there was a beef between Tinto Brass and the guy financing the project, Bob Guccione, otherwise known as the founder of
Penthouse. You can see where this is going - eventually Guccione was the last man standing in the crew, and he decided to go totally YOLO and turned it into a sprawling orgy. The only reason it was probably released was because the poor English theatre veterans mentioned above were still contractually obliged to appear in it. I can just picture a nice old lady that looks like Judi Dench going, 'Ooh, I do love that strapping young McDowell, what a fine - oh, oh my God, OH, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR FIST TO THAT MAN?!' In the first scene of
Caligula, Caligula and his sister Drusilla are cavorting in a field of sheep. He slaps her on the butt, and then they run around with barely any clothes on. It's all downhill from there, with peen and vageen flopping and fwanging about everywhere, and the occasional hysterical speech read out in Ye Olde Timey voices by actors that look out of their minds on coke.
Caligula is kept in my DVD collection simply because it has the honour of being the most decadent and depraved of my dubious DVDs. It is unflinchingly graphic, bizarre, smutty, sick, and wild. I've only watched it twice, and I apologise to the people who had to watch it with me, and have thus also had their retinas scarred. It's like a Lovecraftian hero facing Cthulhu for the first time - what has been seen cannot be unseen.