Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

This movie is gross from a multiply of positions. It doesn't have any redeeming features or points what so ever. Not for anyone with a weak stomach.

With his "Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom," director Pier Paolo Pasolini gives us depravity to the nth degree. Nine teenage boys and nine teenage girls are taken prisoner in a majestic villa in 1944 Fascist Italy. With the source material being the Marquis de Sade's tome, we pretty much think we have an idea of what we are in store for. Yet it is more graphic than that, given that the images are celluloid as opposed to just words on a page. Roughly, the first third of the film was fine (a relative term); the second, nauseating; and the third, with a horrendous final ten minutes, almost unbearable. The things I liked about Salo have to do with the first third, especially at the beginning when three young men try to flee on bikes their future captors; you can see the fear in their faces. Or the young lady who mourns the mother who died trying to save her from what is going to be a terrible fate. I enjoyed the sets and the costumes, an elaborateness that, coupled with the grotesqueness, put me in mind of Peter Greenaway's equally disgusting, but for me more gorgeous and far more watchable, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Those bits of appreciation are more old-school cinematic, I suppose. The scenes with the human waste and the scenes of violence are ones that I found more difficult, despite the always beautiful cinematography. Pasolini is tough for me, and admittedly the more modern Teorema (with its 1960s bourgeois family affected by an enigmatic visitor) is the work of his that I most esteem.