Disillusioned by the sexual revolution, which he felt had only entrenched sexuality in consumerism and bourgeois rationalism, Pasolini disowned his “Trilogy of Life,” the three early 1970s films intended as erotic celebrations of the body, and responded with his most notorious and final film, Salò. Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s reign, the film liberally adapts Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, using the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap young victims for a sacrificial orgy to launch a ruthless and wide-ranging attack on modernity as a whole. Setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumerist alienation, Salò delivers a trenchant political allegory that tends to be overshadowed by its explicit nudity and images of sexual sadism. The film’s ultimately extreme violence and deviant sexuality have earned it the reputation as arguably the first “artsploitation” movies, a precursor to the likes of Funny Games (1997, 2007) and Irreversible (2002).