Messalina, Messalina! (1977)

User Rating:

4.1/10   

Director:

Bruno Corbucci

Writers:

Mario Amendola (screenplay)
Bruno Corbucci (story)

Release Date:

11 August 1977 (Italy)

Genre:

Drama | Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Historical Fiction | Ancient Rome | Gore | Italian Sex Comedy | Unofficial Sequel

Cast

Anneka Di Lorenzo	...	Messalina
Vittorio Caprioli	...	Claudius
Giancarlo Prete
Lori Wagner	...	Agrippina (as Lory Kay Wagner)
Raf Luca
Bombolo
Pino Ferrara
Sal Borgese
Alessandra Cardini
Luca Sportelli
Ombretta De Carlo
Primo Marcotulli
Viviana Larice
Lino Toffolo	...	Gaius Silius
Tomas Milian	...	Baba

Also Known As:

Caligula II: Messalina, Messalina (USA) (DVD title)
Caligula, Part II: Messalina, Empress of Love
Caligula: Sins of Rome (USA) (video title)
Messalina, Empress of Rome (USA)

Runtime:

100 min | Germany:86 min

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color

Certification:

West Germany:18 (nf) | Finland:K-18 | France:-16 | Germany:16 (DVD rating) | Germany:18 (video rating) | Germany:BPjM Restricted

Filming Locations:

Dear Studios, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Trivia:

The production recycled virtually all of the sets, costumes, props and extras from Caligola (1979), when it was feared that the former film would never be released due to numerous pending lawsuits and the $20 million dollars worth production value would go to waste.

Watch it for the ending... or just watch the ending.

Partly due to the fact that it was Italian, partly because of the title, partly because it also starred Lori Wagner and Anneka Di Lorenzo, and partly because it used sets leftover from the Tinto Brass epic, I fully expected 'Messalina, Messalina!' to be a gratuitously sleazy rip-off of the infamous 'Caligula', in the vein of Bruno Mattei's 'Caligula and Messalina' or Joe D'Amato's 'Caligula 2: The Untold Story'.

I certainly didn't expect a desperately unfunny sex/comedy with dreadful slapstick humour, awful dubbing (Messalina sounds like Mae West!), wacky characters and the occasional fart joke. Which is a shame, 'cos that's (almost) exactly what I got!

Messalina (Anneka Di Lorenzo), wife of Emperor Claudius, is an insatiable nymphomaniac who screws all and sundry behind her husband's back. When she meets hunky Gaius Silius (Lino Toffolo), who somehow resists her sexual advances, she becomes determined to get him in the sack—even if it means conspiring to overthrow Claudius.

Despite plenty of nudity from Di Lorenzo, an hour into this laugh-free mess of a movie and I was tempted to turn the film off to save myself twenty minutes more suffering. But I struggled on, and, to be honest, I was actually glad that I did because, ten minutes before the end, the whole shebang gets a whole lot more entertaining, with a scene of OTT gore that (almost) makes watching the film worthwhile.

In the blood-drenched finale, the Praetorian guard are sent to massacre Messalina and her cohorts, and the result is a surprisingly fun ending to an otherwise execrable film. People are hacked to pieces, and blood sprays all over the place; with body parts everywhere and the floor covered in blood, this moment reminded me of the 'lawnmower' sequence in Peter Jackson's Braindead.

It's just a shame that in order to get to it, I had to subject myself to so much dross.

As a rule, the inclusion of hot nekkid chicks will (almost) always guarantee that a film will not get 1/10 from me, but 'Messalina, Messalina!' was shaping up to be an exception to that rule. However, thanks to the outrageous and messy gore in the closing moments, it winds up getting 3/10. All hail messy gore!