from www.adultcybermart.com – While Caligula may not be the worst movie ever made, the pungent aroma coming from your TV is not a dead mouse in your DVD player, either.

The first time I saw Caligula was in the movies and had no recollection of it. The woman I was seeing – Crazy Mary- liked dirty movies and so we went. Theaters in those days still had balconies, and in some secluded section of one, Mary, so turned on by togas, went to the forum on my Johnson.

Be advised, such covert practices hardly encourage the attention required for objective movie review. It was only when I got my hands on a DVD copy that I saw Caligula for the complete cinematic atrocity that it was.

A cheaply realized play [a Gore Vidal play, no less] passing itself off as a movie, it probably put an end to Malcolm McDowell’s career as a serious actor; and Peter O’Toole was already at the ebb of the ebb and flow of his career so it was probably just a pay day, or whatever passed as currency, for him.

Caligula’s also proof that naked female ass dressed in feeble attempts at pretentious Shakespearean emoting, gets pretty boring after awhile. But it wasn’t until I saw it in the full light of day to make me realize that a pox appropriately cast on all of Caligula’s participants might have been in order.

Director Bob Guccione, who fancied himself a modern day Caesar, wound up losing his empire. McDowell became a straight-to-video actor. Helen Mirren, apparently slumming, must have come along for the joy ride because she liked doing the occasional randy project. O’Toole just stopped caring, and one of the other principals in the film, Anneka Vasta [pictured], aka Anneka DeLorenzo, a former Penthouse Pet of the Year, is the subject of a grim fate that generally begets pinup girls.

Because she’s a redhead, Vasta, in Caligula, gets to play the Lindsay Lohan of the Roman Empire, Messalina. Though I’ll take Susan Hayward’s Messalina in Demetrius and The Gladiators any day.

[Hint: Jay Robinson’s Caligula beats McDowell’s into a bloody pulp.]

Proving what I said about a pox, Vasta’s appearance in Caligula proved detrimental to her career though Brian De Palma hired her for a small part in Dressed to Kill.

In another role she never saw coming, Vasta, 58, wound up as a naked corpse washed ashore on a Marine training beach at Camp Pendleton, January 4 this year. Vasta was discovered with a broken neck and back. She had drowned.

Police are still trying to establish how Vasta, whose car was found parked a mile south on a 60 ft. cliff, got where she got and whether her death was a suicide. Investigators believe that if Vasta jumped from the bluffs below, her body would not have hit the water, because the tide is not high enough at the location.

Vasta’s family is ruling out the suicide theory, and police are looking into whether Vasta may have been a victim of foul play at the hands of someone she may have met over the New Year’s holiday.

Vasta, who was born Marjorie Lee Thoreson in St Paul, Minnesota, July,1952, had been living near her sister Susan Thoreson in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Vasta is believed to have left Los Angeles in the early hours of January 2 and driven south in a maroon 2001 Mazda 626 sedan, with many of her possessions packed in the trunk.

Just before 6am, she rented a room at the Motel 6 on Raintree Drive, near South Carlsbad State Beach but never checked out. According to reports she drove around until 8.30am, making calls to family and friends, the last of which was from a the vicinity of where she parked her car. What happened after that is a mystery.

When investigators discovered the Mazda, Vasta’s phone and purse were still in it, as well as a blood-stained leopard-print blouse and a sports bra, which was wrapped in a plastic bag from the Motel 6.

A steak knife with Vasta’s blood on it was found by the passenger floorboard. Lithium and an empty bottle of Xanax were found in the car but an autopsy showed no drugs in the dead woman’s body.

The medical examiner reported shallow cuts on Vasta’s wrists, consistent with a half-hearted suicide attempt. She also had two stab wounds on her chest.

Vasta dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles after her parents divorced in 1965, where she worked as a receptionist, a cocktail waitress, and a topless dancer.

She met Bob Guccione in 1973, and he agreed to make her the Pet of the Month for that September. In 1988 Vasta sued Guccione for $4M on charges of sexual harassment. He was found guilty of forcing her to have sex with two business associates. After a two year legal battle Vasta was awarded a shitty $4.06 after an appeal ruled the money was not recoverable.

If you’re keeping score at home, here’s how other Playmates and pinups fare in the bad luck dept.:

> Former 1968 Playboy Playmate of the Year Victoria Vetri is serving nine years for the attempted murder of her husband. Losing the movie role of Lolita to Sue Lyon was just the beginning of the downhill slide for Vetri who tried putting a couple of slugs into her husband because she suspected he was cheating on her. The gun was gift from Roman Polanski.

> Stripper, prostie and part time actress Chandra Moore’s body was found last January in a trash bin behind a strip club in Orlando Florida. Her killing went unsolved for months. Then on Aug. 3, a DNA match led homicide detectives to Steve Everett Giddens. Giddens who was convicted of killing a 24 year-old Polk County prostitute in 1980, served 16 years of a 35 year sentence on a second degree murder rap. He’s now charged with first degree murder in Moore’s slaying. Moore was an actress in the 1990s who made cameo appearances in such TV shows as “Baywatch” and “Married … With Children.” She kept an online blog about her days in Hollywood but was stabbed and raped during an attack while living in California. She lost an eye as a result and suffered a mental breakdown afterward.

> The burning body of Playboy model Paula Sladewski, 26, was found in Miami outside of Club Space January 3, 2010. Sladewski and her boyfriend Kevin Klym were visiting from California to celebrate the New Year.

Sladewski who also worked as an exotic dancer, planned to open either a tanning salon or a dog accessory boutique. Sladewski wasn’t supposed to be in Miami that weekend. She planned to ring in the new year in Las Vegas. Except she found an online deal for tickets to Lady Gaga’s New Year’s Eve concert at the Fontainebleau and changed her mind, making plans with boyfriend Kevin Klym for Miami. Wrong decision.

Sladewski and Klym got into an argument. Heleft. Club surveillance video showed Sladewski leaving the club as a man walked behind her. Witnesses outside the club told police they last saw her walking away with a different man, not the one in the video. About 9 p.m., a fire was spotted in a trash bin in the 1400 block of Northeast 130th Street in North Miami. A body was found inside, burned beyond recognition. Investigators used dental records to confirm it was Sladewski. Her killer’s never been found.

> Softcore porn actress and Playboy model Felicia Tang, 31, was found murdered in September, 2009 in a home she shared in Monrovia, California with her boyfriend Bryan Randone. She attended school in Australia, performed in mainstream movies like “Rush Hour 2” as well as adult films such as “Hotel Decadence” and “Peach Ultra Vixens: Asians.”

Tang could also be seen with reality star Tila Tequila in an erotic video found online, Tang and Tequila both nude and fondling each other in a pool. Randone, an ex-preacher who hold a master’s in divinity and appeared in 2000 on the reality show “The Sexiest Bachelor in America,” was charged with murder and torture. Witnesses say the couple was involved in a domestic dispute before the slaying.

> An actress and pinup model from the 1950’s,Yvette Vickers was also Playboy Magazine’s Miss July 1959. Vickers died at the age of 82 when her mummified remains were found by a neighbor. Vickers would appear at different Sci-Fi and glamorcon conventions up until two years ago when apparent mental illness and alcohol abuse caught up with her. From the way you can size up her obit, Vickers, who had been in movies such as Hud and Sunset Boulevard, died of neglect.

> Playboy’s first centerfold, Marilyn Monroe’s untimely demise was originally listed as probable suicide due to an overdose. Though evidence now suggests Monroe died from an enema with a Nembutal chaser.

The list of suspects hatching a murder plot has everyone from the Kennedy Brothers to Peter Lawford involved, but mobster Sam Giancana also pops up as a suspect when Jeff Platts, a 60-year-old sales consultant from Southern California, claimed to have tapes in which his uncle George Masters, Monroe’s personal hair stylist and makeup artist for a number of years leading up to her death, added new elements to the half century-old mystery.

It was Masters who created Monroe’s signature look and styled her hundreds of times, including her famous final photo sessions. Masters died in 1998. About a month before he passed away, Masters recorded some tapes with Platts in which he told how the night before Monroe died she was in Lake Tahoe at the Cal-Neva Lodge with Sam Giancana.

Hours later she’d be found dead in the bed of her guest house in Brentwood. From what Platts could also draw from his uncle, Monroe was first found alive but in a series of Keystone Kops maneuverings wound up dead after she had been shifted, ala Weekend at Bernie’s, from one location to another. It was Masters who also advanced that notion that Monroe was the victim of a lethal enema.

“It was because of the Kennedys. I really think the FBI did it,” says Masters in the tapes.

On the subject of Monroe’s last hours check out this fascinating book.[Read the story here]

> Information is now coming to light that the auto accident which killed bombshell Jayne Mansfield in June,1967 [her car crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer] may have some sinister undertones. Mansfield, like Marilyn Monroe, was allegedly a bedroom consort to Bobby Kennedy. Mansfield has also appeared in Playboy.

> Playmate Anna Nicole Smith died in Hollywood, Fla., at the age of 39, after she collapsed in her hotel room and was found to be unresponsive.

> Miss December 1994 Elisa Bridges died of a drug overdose. Playboy posted an announcement of her Feb. 7, 2002, on its Web site a few days later, saying Bridges had died from “natural causes in Los Angeles” at the age of 28. But the Los Angeles County coroner later found that a massive accidental drug overdose killed her. The drug in question? Heroin.

> Playmate Willy Rey, a Vancouver woman featured as Playboy’s 1971 centerfold, took her own life at age 23 by consuming a large quantity of barbiturates in August 1973.

> Sharon Tate – the late wife of now-exiled film director Roman Polanski- once did a Playboy shoot and was murdered in the couple’s house in August 1969 along with four friends by members of serial killer Charles Manson’s family.

> Playboy Playmate Star Stowe, Miss February 1977, dated Kiss band member Gene Simmons. Stowe slipped from the spotlight and into prostitution, alcoholism and drug abuse after moving to Ft. Lauderdale. Only days before her 41st birthday, in 1997, Stowe was found murdered in Coral Springs, Fla.

> Dorothy Stratten was a former ice cream shop employee from Vancouver before rising to fame as a Playboy centerfold and movie ingenue. She was the Playmate of the Year in 1980. That same year, she was found shot to death in Los Angeles in what police believed was a murder-suicide involving her estranged husband and ex-manager Paul Snider. Stratten was only 20. The pair’s bodies were found together with a gun in the bedroom of the home they both owned in West Los Angeles.

> Others who appeared in the magazine died young in car crashes. Claudia Jennings, the Playmate of the Year in 1970 and also Miss November 1969, was killed in an accident in 1979 at the age of 29 when she fell asleep at the wheel of her VW convertible in southern California.

> Then we had an unfortunate situation in Westlake, Ohio involving the former and late Playboy Playmate Jennifer Jackson. Westlake police arrested Jackson and charged her with disorderly intoxication. Officers were dispatched to a trailer park when they arrived, they found Jackson and her new husband, 52-year old James Thompson, under the influence of alcohol. Jackson, a 1989 playmate, said she did nothing wrong and had no idea why police arrested her though Jackson has had several recent run-ins with law enforcement. In 2005, Jackson was charged with receiving stolen property, but charges were later dropped. She was also arrested and charged with theft and drunk driving though police also say they found marijuana in her possession. Jackson would eventually be found dead of a drug overdose in January of 2010.