Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom - Criterion Collection

I rented Saló after reading the reviews on both Netflix and Amazon.com. I thought I was getting a visually stunning, mind opening, erotic masterpiece. What I saw was one of the most disturbing moves ever made. It is sick, twisted and demented to say the least. There is nothing erotic about this movie at all; there is nothing beautiful about this movie at all. I do not believe in censorship and anyone has the right to make a movie on any subject but I do have the right to say this is just not for me and I personally found Saló sickening. I would not recommend this movie to anyone and in fact warned my wife not to watch it because I knew it would make her ill. Please be aware of what you are getting if you buy or rent this movie. I will add my very short synopsis of the movie, a bunch or sick freaks, kidnap and torture some poor young people, with some rape, and murder thrown in.

Salo is the most repulsive depiction of moral depravity and cruelty I have ever seen put to film. It's as violent and disgusting as you can imagine, as acts of pure evil are depicted in stark realism before your eyes. This is what it means to lose all semblance of humanity and become an agent of evil. Pasolini has decided to show this in horrid detail. It is a heinous film.

As disgusted as I am with the hypocrisy of the world, and how naive people are to the malevolence that lives in so many people's hearts, I am divided as to whether a film such as Salo helps matters any. Watching it, one cannot help but feel voyeuristic in these horrendous crimes and I believe it was part of Pasolini's sick joke to "deflower" the audience. I am of the opinion that crimes such as these are within the realm of possibility for nearly any human being -- and that the first step towards them is breaking down the inherent, civilized revulsion we have toward such things. Yet I also do not think that Salo is in any way titillating -- if anything it is a very stark, brutal film that will have the opposite affect on most of the audience; with the sanitization of pornography and violence in or culture as of 2008, Salo perhaps has merit as depicting where all of this can ultimately lead us.

I just cannot bring myself to give it a higher rating.

A masterpiece, one of the great films of world cinema. Pasolini brilliantly fuses De Sade's "120 Days Of Sodom" with Nazi/Fascist ideology. Watching the film along with Criterion's supplemental material, I think the giant powerful theme of the film becomes clear---that all power is fundamentally, innately, irredeemably pathological. Pasolini was a disillusioned Marxist who finally saw that no political system could root out this fundamental pathology of human nature. He sees all power as inevitably corrupting & that the logical conclusion of unchecked power is the mass-murder jamborees of the Nazi death camps, Stalin's gulags, Pol Pot's killing fields. His images shockingly prefigure Abu Grahib. He thinks any power of one individual over another has an inevitable sexual sado-masochistic charge to it. For him no system of government can rise above this innate pathology. At worst we get these horrific mass murdering miltary dictatorships, at best we get "democracies" that give us scary, incompetent, power-hungry egomaniacs like Bush, Cheney, et al. (And he wouldn't find the Democrats much better.) As a previous reviewer pointed out, Pasolini's view is blunt, bleak, unironic, an unmitigated kick in the face. And profound.

Talk philosophy all you want, but raping, torturing and executing children isn't art. The small bit of Neitzsche flowing from the poo filled mouths of torturers in this film doesn't justify it's existence. I've never advocated the ban of anything in my life and am very opposed to the idea. What two consenting adults want to explore is up to them. But this film can only serve to feed psychopathic appetites. I wouldn't have argued for this film's demise if it had been about adults. But children, no way. This film is shocking in the same way that car accidents thrill some people, but its point was much better made in the film Lilya 4-Ever [Region 2]

The 120 Days of Sodom is adapted from the Marquis De Sade's 18 century novel. Set in the Nazi-controlled Italian city Salò, the film depicts unspeakable acts of human brutality (rape, torture, mutilation, and murder) drawn from both de Sade's book as well as from Pasolini's own life under Fascist rule. The film is divided into four segments reminiscent of Dante's Inferno: Anteinferno, the Circle of Obsessions, the Circle of Feces, and the Circle of Blood. The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno (Penguin Classics) Four Fascits kidnap eighteen adolescent boys and girls, who they then brutalize and ultimately execute at a secluded palace. To facilitate the rulers desires, three old gaudy prostitutes sit in the orgy room each night telling tales of their own dehumanization with delight (and a lot of bad blue eye shadow). The major theme of most of their stories involves selling themselves as children to old perverts and really enjoying it. More delight for pedophiles.

I'll give credit where credit is due. The best performances in this film are by the fascists. The children aren't into this at all. Except for one girl who cries about her mother and two other children who kill themselves, most of these characters have no reaction to their new circumstances and the performances are flat. In the first wedding scene you can see the actors giggling as one of the rulers goes around elatedly kissing them. And that is perhaps the most disturbing thing about this film. You can't develop much empathy for characters that aren't screaming and fighting this insanity. It seems the director wanted the victims to seem inhuman, which leads me to question the true nature of this film. If you really want to see what rape and slavery are like, watch Lilya 4-Ever. Watch the tears leave the eye of a girl who is betrayed by mother and forced into occasional prostitution and then full on slavery. Experience being locked in an apartment from which there is no escape, fed from the McDonald's drive-thru each night, and then carted around in the back of a car from party to party. It doesn't look glamourous. And that true to life depiction of what Lilya goes through is what is missing from Salo which is why this film is just gratuitous and dumb.

I'll concede Salo raises interesting questions about our bodies and what we consider our own. One scene depicts how shallow human bonds of loyalty and empathy are. The children are begging for empathy from their torturers but have no qualms about betraying each other even if they know it will mean murder of the people they accuse. But, again, the same point is better illustrated in the works of Primo Levi-who like this film director, survived the Nazis Survival In Auschwitz.

Philosophically this film is disturbing because it confronts you with things you would rather not consider. Marquis De Sade wrote and lived in a time when women and children were property. You could do with them as you pleased. We'd like to think laws have changed since then. But the US has Abu Ghraib. Or consider the fact that when communist rule fell, 20% of women and children in former Soviet Republics disappeared. That is an astonishing number. Most were kidnapped by the Russian mafia and sold into white slavery. Maybe things haven't changed as much as we've hoped.

The Criterion Collection's Double-Disc Special Edition of Salo features a newly restored high-definition digital transfer, documentaries, interviews with the director, and an on-set diary of the film.

Pasolini, the director of this Salo, was murdered by a male prostitute in the slum of Ostia shortly before the film was released. There is a sad and poignant irony in the fact that Pasolini's mode of death better illustrates the nature of humanity than his final film does.

Half way through this movie, I became sick and disgusted. I pull it out of the DVD player and cut it to small bits and threw everthing in the garbage.

The movie is "Bruttus" (ugly)! And should remain ban.