Salo (1975)

Salo: The 120 days of Sodom, is the most disturbing movie that I have ever seen. Period. Unless you can handle some really disgusting stuff, I would not even consider reading this review. Anyways, lets continue with the crapfest.
Salo depicts a symbolic event in which four wealthy aristocratic men in World War I Italy act out and follow through with the most disgusting sexual pleasures ever conceived by man. There's everything from sodomy, to eating human feces, to scalping. All this is going on while all of the victims are completely naked. I ended up stopping it about thirty minutes in and really thinking about whether I wanted to finish it. I caved and decided that I needed to finish it because I had already started it, and because I had a partner in crime so that I didn't have to watch it alone.
After watching Salo, and doing some research to see what other people were writing about it, I found a parallel between Salo and terrible things that it portrayed, and Dante's "Inferno" and the different levels of hell, which when I think about it, that could be what the director, Pier Paulo Pasolini, was alluding to. It's also apperent that he was drawing parallels between what is portrayed in Salo, and the terrible living conditions for Italians under the facist ruling of Benito Mussolini.
Honestly, I had to dig very, very deep to find anything about the symbolism and meaning of this movie. It was difficult to really get anything from it except that the living conditions were terrible in Italy during the time. The only time that "Salo" is mentioned is in the first five minutes of the film when it is seen on a street sign.
In my opinion this movie should difintely be given serious thought to if it is to be considered watching. This morally shaking film is so incredibly grotesque and disgusting that it really shook me to the core. It gets a 2/5 for ruining my life.