Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.
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- Cast:
- Paolo Bonacelli , Giorgio Cataldi , Uberto Paolo Quintavalle , Aldo Valletti , Caterina Boratto , Elsa De Giorgi , Hélène Surgère
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Reviews
That was an excellent one.
For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!
Absolutely Fantastic
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Okay first of all those who are saying this movie is powerful, strong......you guys are out of your mind this is completely pointless movie .. i don't think there is any connection of WW2 with this movie. i think director only want to show his own sick fantasies and nothing else. completely waste of time even though i have watched more sick movies than this, i cant tolerate this one, because same thing repeat again and again and then it starts to irritate you. a complete pointless movie i don't know why some people rated it 9 or 10.
This film is a metaphor on Capitalism and Fascism. Four members of the ruling elite that represent both the government & church officials rule a château, where kidnapped young men and women are grotesquely exploited to provide degenerate, masochist entertainment for this ruling elite. Capitalism is projected as a degenerate system of arbitrary law. In the Capitalist world only those of the lower classes that completely obey its irrational and arbitrary rules survive.The film is based upon the Marquis De Sade's novel, Salo. However, the ending of this film ends differently. In De Sade's novel, which I believe is important to state and doesn't give away the film's ending, but gives further thought to the film: The ruling elite are asked by a spectator why they acted as they did? Their response: By perpetuating unjust and cruel misery they were just reproducing God's rule on earth in their confines. After all, what is characteristic of the world is, but that it is full of unjust, immoral suffering. Please note, the film is extremely degenerate, graphic and revolting. It is not for the faint-hearted.
I was told this was a classic film. As a classic, I expected it to be either aside from the mainstream or defining of a genre. It manages to be both, actually. It is definitely not mainstream, because of the subject portrayed and the way it is shown. It also defines a genre that is, also definitely, not part of the mainstream (somewhat, luckily)."Salo" is about a group of perverts (male and female) that exploits the Nazi-Fascist war machine to kidnap, torture and kill young people... And that's all. It has no plot, it's just a portrait. There is no character development, there is no story whatsoever and there is no point of anything for any reason.There is a lot of background story (and History) behind the scenes, but not a single drop of it is put on screen. If an alien civilisation picked this film to watch, without knowing anything about WWII, they wouldn't understand anything shown (except, maybe, that the human species is one of the dumbest in the whole universe, eating their faeces and killing their youngsters for nothing, not even for the fun of it).It's amazingly boring, slow paced and pointless in everything. The villains have no motivation other than sexual and murderous drive to act, and they act absolutely randomly along the whole film. Every time one of the victims die, they mock the survivors by counting them, making one believe that there will be some kind of "whatever" when the count goes down to one, but that never happens, as the film runtime just ends and everybody left is taken outside to be tortured and slaughtered. Considering that on the previous scenes the victims were forced to eat and bathe in faeces, I guess dying was actually a happy ending! It plays like a mockumentary or a stupid video clip. The acting is terrible, both on the villains' and on the victims' side, some of them can't even hide a smile while they are being oppressed (as there is no background story on screen, at first it made me think they were playing some kind of game, before the film's beginning).And when you think it's finally over and that it cannot get any worse, the film cuts to two young Nazi soldiers, who join hands and start dancing... So, the message is, Nazis are are people, too, and can love (each other, at least) like everybody else does...?! "Salo" is not only boring, it's pretentious, amateurishly scripted and devoid of any enjoyable content, unless you are a hardcore fan of coprophagy (oh no, at least, it's fake).
This film was recommended to me as a groundbreaking, trendsetting, example of horror film unlike anything I had ever seen. And it is unlike anything I had ever seen in that I don't think I have ever seen a more uninteresting and boring film. The shock value is there, there is no denying that the movie goes for the throat so to speak, with regards to trying way too hard to evoke visceral reactions from the viewer with gratuitous representations of morbidity and depravity. However the production is so poor that mostly it comes across as having the same level of production value as a high school musical. The practical effects are weak, and in the 70's nudity was far from being scandalous whereas now it is just downright tame. The ideas presented in the film are convoluted and a little bit ridiculous. Meandering monologues of old men speaking directly into the camera and shaky camera work throughout the film make it difficult to watch and take seriously despite the grave nature of the subject matter. If you handle boredom well and have a stomach for unsophisticated juvenile political ideals then maybe this outdated eye vomit will be tolerable and entertaining. I found reading the reviews here to be far more entertaining and interesting than the movie itself