What Did Everyone Order at 'Caligula: The Ultimate Cut'?

Diet cokes, Caesar salads, and wine—more wine!

Hey everyone,

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve made a paid subscriber post, but good news: you can become one today! Substack offers a free trial membership, which hopefully you’ll sign up and forget about just like your 10 other streaming subscriptions.

As part of Analog August, I’ve been spending some time at the movies. Not only does this allow me to escape the heat, my phone, and direct communication with any other human beings for at least two hours of my day, but also save a bit of money! Alamo Drafthouse has a season pass that allows you to see up to one movie per day for a little over $1. So, if you go to more than one movie a month, it basically pays for itself and that’s why I go to so many movies now. (Alamo isn’t paying for endorsement, but if they want to, that’s fine by me! #paymealamo).

This past month I saw Chinese animated film Art School 1994, the new M. Night Shyamalan flick Trap (would not have paid full price but entirely worth it for the five minutes that my forever teen crush, Josh Hartnett, was shirtless), and tried four different times to see Deadpool vs. Wolverine (actually, I liked that one a lot—it was pretty fun). So, when I saw that Alamo was going to be screening controversial cult film Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, buying tickets was a real no-brainer.

If you weren’t already familiar with the backstory of this big-budget, sexually explicit flick, the opening credits give you more than enough information just in case you needed a reminder of what you signed up for.

Picture it: it’s the late ‘70s when hedonistic decadence and violence are at a cultural peak. Late Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione dreams up an idea for an art house porno starring respectable actors with a high production value centered around the rise and fall of Roman emperor, Caligula. Best described by his peers as “self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant and sexually perverted; an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated his Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul,” this seems like a natural fit for the kingpin of a porno rag to dip his toes into mainstream Hollywood.

Courting Gore Vidal to write the script and thespians like Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren to star in the film requires a lot of money, which is why half of Caligula’s notoriety is its film budget—the most expensive independent film produced of its time. The other part of Caligula’s damning legacy: Guccione’s final cut, when he decided to pop in at the end to exercise creative control and amplify the use of graphic sex and violence so horrific that the film was subsequently disowned by everyone who participated in it. (Though, it should be noted that McDowell’s performance in A Clockwork Orange came out well before Caligula and had just as much horrific violence, in my opinion, even if it lacked actual pornographic content—just saying).

Naturally, the hoopla earned incredible success at the box office, even though everyone agreed it was still an absolutely terrible film at best and a deeply offensive waste of money unworthy of any reception at worst. While the movie could easily continue playing as an offbeat midnight cult favorite, writer Thomas Negovan decided to painstakingly restore and recut the film entirely using 90 hours of negatives. The resulting movie is still incredibly pornographic and filled with perverse violence, but somehow less of it in this longer cut with the hopes of giving credit to the mega talent that lent to the original vision (and the resolution is pretty fantastic, too!).

But let’s be real: just shy of three hours, the sensory overload is enough to work an appetite, amirite?! So, what was everyone eating at Caligula: The Ultimate Cut?