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Messalina, Messalina!
Caligua II: Messalina, Messalina
Caligula II: Messalina, Empress of Love / Messalina, Empress of Rome / Caligula: Sins of Rome
Italy 1977
produced by Franco Rossellini, Renato Jacobi for Medusa Produzione
directed by Bruno Corbucci
starring Anneka Di Lorenzo, Vittorio Caprioli, Giancarlo Prete, Lori Wagner, Lino Toffolo, Tomas Milian, Raf Luca, Bombolo, Pino Ferrara, Sal Borgese, Alessandra Cardini, Luca Sportelli, Ombretta De Carlo, Primo Marcotulli, Viviana Larice, Alessandro Cardini, Taylor Mead
written by Mario Amendola, Bruno Corbucci, music by Guido De Angelis, Maurizio De Angelis
Mesalina
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Messalina (Anneka Di Lorenzo) is the biggest slut of all of Rome, she
has sex with pretty much everybody, and even has a room in a local brothel
assigned especially to her, where she welcomes random customers.
Everybody in Rome of course knows that, well, everybody but her husband,
Emperor Claudius (Vittorio Caprioli), who thinks she's chaste as can be,
so chaste in fact that not even he is allowed to touch her. Claudius
though has other worries: He's not as popular among the Romans as he wants
to be, and he blames it on Baba (Tomas Milian), a small-fry crook who
publicly mocks the emperor at every opportunity. So he comes up with a
wicked plan: Why not put him in the emperor's shoes for a limited time? So
Baba is drugged, brought to the palace and put into the emperor's bed -
and soon enough, he behaves just as bad as your average emperor would. The
highlight of his being the emperor is of course bedding Messalina (to
which she readily agrees), then though he is drugged and thrown back in to
the gutter. Messalina meanwhile has other problems: She desperately
wants to shag Gaius Silius (Lino Toffolo), but he insists on getting
married first ... so Messalina persuades her husband the emperor to
divorce her as a kind of ruse (?), then she marries Gaius Silius in an
orgy. When Claudius learns about the orgy though, he has his soldiers sent
over to kill everybody, and only by sheer luck can Gaius Silius and
Messalina escape. Claudius meanwhile decides to marry Agrippina (Lori
Wagner), Messalina's treacherous maid ... and she soon becomes an even
bigger slut than Messalina herself. Cheaply made Italian
sex-comedy in peplum attire - and the outcome is as you'd expect it,
rather silly - and not in a good way: The film as such lacks a stringent
narrative and is rather made up of several only loosely connected
episodes, most of the jokes in this film are less than funny (though it's
at least interesting how much blood-spilling- and decapitation-slapstick
is put into the final massacre), the comic timing is off most of the time,
and an over-reliance on supporting actors with funny faces doesn't make
the comedy any better. And while the film might serve as a document of the
state of the Italian sexual farce in the latter part of the 1970's, it's
also not really worth your time.
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