Pier Paolo Pasolini's brutal indictment of a film has been re-released by Criterion

First things first. This film has no redeeming moral value by the time you get to the end. Or in other words there is no redemption here and no promise of redemption. It takes as its source material, two very corrupt and twisted points-of-departure. The first is the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days" and the other the legacy of the Italian branch of Fascism. "Corrupt" and "twisted" are two very judgemental words and I'm probably using them to give myself some kind of moral protection from the single most upsetting films I have ever seen . The essence of the plot is this: a company of haute bourgeoise fascists round up a group of teenaged boys and girls and sweep them away to a country estate (Salo) where they proceed to torture ,rape, mutilate and murder the victims .
The violence is self-consciously staged, the sex is made to seem as fake and boring as possible and the scenes designed to elicit the most disgust involve using the finest Belgian chocolate as a special prop. Despite all that "Brechtian" breakage, I've never been able to finish this film without being incredibly depressed. Frankly I sometimes hate watching it. Which was probably Pasolini's intention. So why Salo as a recommendation? The extreme to which Pasolini goes in expressing his self-hatred for what he percieves as the worst aspects of his culture is uncompromising. Things look chic and they look like they may be transgressive in that titillating way. But ultimately the film goes much further than that. There has been no greater indictment of bourgeoise hypocricy than what is expressed here.