‘Caligula’ is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn. That this film is not only garbage on an artistic level, but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience. I wanted to tell them,what did I want to tell them? What I’m telling you now. That was on a Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Here’s how Ebert kicked off his review when he got back to his typewriter: ‘Caligula’ is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bob Guccione’s big-budget Ancient Rome porn extravaganza, Caligula. ![]() A film that was so inept and god-awful he had to get up and walk out of the theater. Still, even the most masochistic movie reviewer can have his or her limit. It’s 406 pages long-and according to Ebert, it merely represented the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds? Thousands? The doorstop-thickness of his essential anthology, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie offers a hint at the sheer massiveness of the number. (“Centurion” contains extreme, graphic violence.I wouldn’t know where to even begin when it comes to tallying up how many truly shitty movies Roger Ebert had to sit through in his four-and-a-half decades as a film critic. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium and suburban theaters. Still, she is her king’s “wrath,” a barbarian angel of death. Etain, who sports fox pelts and blue war paint and wields a deadly, halberd-like spear, does not speak because her tongue was cut out after she was gang raped as a child by Roman soldiers. ![]() The Romans speak Brit-accented English, while the Picts speak Scots Gaelic with subtitles. If you want to see what fighting with bladed weapons very likely looked like, behold this display of beheadings, dismemberments, throat slittings and arrow piercings. ![]() On a brief rest stop, they encounter Arianne (the gorgeous Imogeen Poots), a “necromancer” and healer banished to woodsy solitude by the cruel Pict King Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen).īeautifully shot by Sam McCurdy (“The Descent,’ “Doomsday”), “Centurion” is a throwback to the great Roman legionnaire and gladiator movies, but with prosthetics and “300”-style digital makeup effects. 117 and appropriately enough in medias res with a devastating attack upon a remote Roman garrison on the wrong side of what will be Hadrian’s Wall in a part of Britannia that will become modern-day Scotland.Īmong the other survivors are fellow legionnaires Bothos (David Morrissey), Brick (Liam Cunningham) and Macros (Noel Clarke) and cleaver-wielding Syrian camp cook Tarak (Riz Ahmed).Īlong the way, the Romans must scale towers of rock, drink hot stag blood, leap hundreds of feet into raging waters, fend off ravenous wolves, all while being chased and cut down. ![]() soldiers flee war-painted, rampaging Indians, a sort of Celtic “Last of the Mohicans.” On this level, “Centurion” also resembles an American Western in which U.S. Michael Fassbender of “Inglourious Basterds” leads a band of Roman soldiers, survivors of a deadly Pict raid upon the legendary 9th Roman Legion, across breathtakingly beautiful and forbidding Caledonian mountain terrain to escape the clutches of Pict assassins led by “she-wolf” Etain (Olga Kurylenko). Written and directed by Neil Marshall (“Dog Soldiers,” “The Descent,” “Doomsday”), the film is yet another high-powered hybrid from the former “Splat Pack” member. If you liked “300,” say ave to “Centurion,” the tolchockingest ancient-Roman-set film in ages.Īs one filmmaker proudly observes, it’s got “gore, a bit more gore, then a sprinkling of blood on top.”
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