Well, to continue our tour of suffering, let's
check out SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. This 1976 flick from Italy is well
known for how explicitly violent and depraved it is, but is also generally well
regarded by smart pants film buffs. It's always hard to tell with these flicks,
before you see them, if they're only well regarded as a badge of honor like,
"I'm a bigger film buff than you because I was able to sit through that
crap" or if it's legitimately good and also happens to be gross.
Even though I've seen SALO, now, I still feel
like I'm kind of on the fence. It's definitely well made and it definitely has
a point to make, so it's not just exploitation. But, it is gross. Super gross.
The movie's about 4 depraved fascists in WW2
Italy (Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintavalle and Aldo
Valletti) who capture a group of teenagers, bring them to a large house, and
use them to proceed to live out all of their torturous and perverted fantasies
of total control and sado-masochism.
Like I said before, to the movie's credit, for
subject matter as depraved as this, the film shows restraint. It's not a gritty
splatterfest and you don't feel like you've dug something up from the depths
when you watch it. It looks and feels like a real film made by a real
filmmaker, which it is.
Director Pier Paolo Pasolini stays pretty
detached from the material, not really lingering on anything to the point where
we get the feeling the filmmakers have prurient interests. If anything, the
camera regards the goings on passively. That's not to say the whole thing seems
improvised. No, there is definitely technical precision here.
This cold approach actually serves to underline
and amplify the unpleasant subject matter rather than diminish it. It's like
stumbling across an immaculately kept, clean, disinfected torture chamber –
it's almost worse that whoever's in charge is taking care of things, knowing
what goes on there.
It seems this year's Horrorfest has more of
the torture type stuff than previous years and I guess that is mostly due to
the fact that I'm working off of the films on Time Out's list that I haven't
seen yet. Turns out lots of them are this type of movie. Oh well.
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