One of the small slew of Roman histories which followed in the wake of Tinto Brass' critically reviled but commercially successful Caligula, Bruno Mattei's Caligula and Messalina doesn't have a great deal to add but what it does have is pretty eye-popping. Unlike Brass' monumental work, Mattei's atrocity has Caligula die about halfway through, continuing the story into the reign of Claudius until he tires of his disgraceful wife Messalina and has her put to the sword. The film is, then, more the story of Messalina than of Caligula, although you wouldn't know it from the set-up, which simply retreads the familiar Caligula story, beginning with some appallingly clunking exposition speeches, the best that can be said about which is that what they expose is then shown on screen, making them not only poor scriptwriting but staggeringly redundant.

The story is enlivened by Mattei's trademark use of stock footage, which means that intermixed with the cheap and cheerless original film are crowd scenes, senate scenes and gladiatorial scenes from early 1960s peplum, including Pontius Pilate and Leone's The Colossus of Rhodes. As usual with Mattei, the stock footage stands out like a sore thumb, or in this case is like a perfect hand on which his own sore thumb has been stuck. Not content with chivvying things up in this fashion, Mattei provides us with not one but two scenes of equine congress in quick succession – the ass's milk for Messalina's bath is helped along by bringing in a long-donged mule to tup the ass, and Caligula's famous senator horse is shown in congress with a mare at the stables,; both scenes include explicit footages of the animal's sexual organs, the latter sequence intercutting footage from Borowczyk's The Beast. Both sequences are about as unnecessary as can be imagined, but they do perk the jaded interest after what has been a fairly dull first 45 minutes.

After this, things get better as Caligula is killed and the story is a little bit less familiar. Messalina, now Claudius' Empress, craves nothing more than huge dick, and is serviced by her well-hung eunuch before skipping down the brothel to try the legendarily huge member of an out-of-towner client (played by the ugliest man to ever hit the screen, Salvatore Baccaro from The Beast in Heat). There's an amusing episode where the Empress feeds a lover to the lions, but the film is for the most part pretty flat, poorly acted and unimaginatively directed, so apart from the outré elements, there's little to engage, and most viewers I should think will be pretty relieved when Messalina meets her end, allowing the film to.

I was interested in these cheap Italian exploitation knockoffs for one reason -- well, that would be Caligula's debaucherous life, but more specifically because I'm such a fan of Tinto Brass' unpleasant trash epic. This movie adds very little to the mystique, (redundantly) rehashing some of Caligula's exploits, then they off him about 40 minutes in. So, really, this is more of a story about his (second) cousin Messalina, who, let me tell ya, is a bigger slut than Caligula ever hoped to be.

One thing I found misleading, was that the Caligula and Messalina Blu-ray included an X-rated cut, just like Brass' did. So, 6 extra minutes of, uh, I dunno, God-knows-what. They ramp up the incest. The vast majority of the sex is simulated, and the countless orgy sequences are done in this super wide screen. One thing I did notice on screen, were a whole lot of shots with, well, an unpleasant part of the male anatomy. Which no one wants to see! Worse still, what IS graphic is not one, but TWO scenes of animals mating. Yikes.

Messalina's portion of the story is one of betrayal, uprising, sleeping with anything with a pulse, so much distant nudity that you become immune to it, and who's going to outstab everyone else to become empress. If you're expecting anything on par with Brass' film (real sex, outrageous performances, elaborate sets, elaborate medieval decapitating devices, distasteful violence, etc. Etc.), I think "sorely disappointed" is all you'll be left with.