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 sackeven 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!
