SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (DVD Review) - 13/5/07

Having read some of the Marquis De Sade which was pretty heavy going I had heard about this film a while back and had not made any further attempts at tracking it down. Reading an article from EMPIRE Film Magazine that just labelled it porn; I felt that couldn't be right, and my opinion on EMPIRE as a neutral film mag has been starting to slide for a while anyway. So onto Ebay I went and got hold of a cheap copy from Greece - Which even had a nice little selection of Special Features in the form of a narrated foreword (written by Pasolini himself), with a four-page Pasolini Bio and a rare posters segment to finish off. Based of the Marquis De Sade's work Director Pier Paolo Pasolini directed his final film in 1975 of "Salo, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom" before shortly being murdered in a suspected cover-up tied to the government. Covering the Nazi-controlled Italian State of Salo in 1944 four high ranking officials kidnap some local youths and proceed to degrade, humiliate and generally sink to the baser depths of morality in an allegory of the state, government, dictatorship and fascism. What an individual will make of it one can only guess as I feel it will affect people in different ways? A trying film for trying times - Which is probably as relevant today as it was then (and still some!) Various versions of the film exist and this one runs for 112 Minutes in Mono Sound. This Greek Version is Region 0 and plays with English Subtitles.