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Today the notorious 1979 film remains the only major motion picture to couple respected, eminent film actors (Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren) with graphic, penetrative, smut-style sex. The 20th-anniversary edition of "Caligula" may be digitally remastered and enhanced with Dolby stereo sound, but its core is as raw as ever.

As part of Penthouse magazine's 20th-anniversary celebration, "Caligula" was given a brief theatrical rerelease earlier this fall and is now available on video and DVD from Image Entertainment. In the film's press release, producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione claims the revised edition of "Caligula" will "fundamentally change the theater-going public's perception of motion pictures."

Apparently, Guccione's goal for "Caligula" was the same goal he has for Penthouse -- to free it from the domain of barbershops and locked basement bureaus and to get the public to acknowledge porn as a worthy art form. But the new "Caligula" DVD comes packaged with a one-hour disc of Penthouse Pet DVD clips -- not exactly the "extra" that you would find enclosed with, say, a Merchant-Ivory period picture. Guccione himself accounts for the differences between "Caligula" and Penthouse porn in purely quantitative terms: "For [the] kind of money [spent on 'Caligula'], I could have made 200 porno films."

The story of a depraved and cruel Roman emperor who sinks into a psychotic hell of sex, torture and casual killing, "Caligula" permanently threw the porn smut curve. Movie reviewer Leonard Maltin spoke for almost every film critic when he said "Caligula" was little more than "chutzpah and six minutes of not-bad hardcore footage ... Most viewers will be rightfully repelled." The TLA Film & Video Guide is more generous: "For those chagrined at having missed the decadence and excess of the Roman Empire, this X-rated epic is as satisfying as a day of debauchery."

Guccione didn't take the criticism well. "I don't wish to sound paranoiac, but I knew, or rather suspected, that the press would see me as a kind of dilettante upstart, an intruder," he says. "No matter how good the film was, they would see me -- Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse, wheeler-dealer in sex and nudity, trying his hand at something new, pressing his luck ... buying his way in."

It's not clear what, exactly, Guccione thinks he bought his way into, but he proudly flaunts the $17.5 million budget that he personally put up (in cash, of course) to produce the original. And, to Guccione's credit, "Caligula" does make you reevaluate your umbrage yardstick. The sex is explicit, yes -- but it is just sex. "Caligula's" gratuitous decapitations and disembowelments -- presumably far less common in everyday life -- are now accepted in everyday cinema, and even then went largely unremarked upon.

Guccione sidestepped the Motion Picture Association of America's inevitable X rating by branding "Caligula" with his own MA (Mature Audiences only) rating. But MA seems far too respectable a label for a film that has all the markings of a chintzy skin flick, and rarely betrays its lavish preparation. The 20th-anniversary edition still has muddy sound, and still uses awkward wide shots and clumsy camera zooms to clump together a shot sequence. Rather than rethink the process of photographing sex, the makers of "Caligula" use Penthouse as their only artistic reference.

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