[Salò] joins the list of little-seen but much-written-about oeuvres de scandale which fuel the fires of the censorship debate. This is perhaps the greatest pity, since the film is one of those works which is undoubtedly more horrifying in print than it is on screen. A mere catalogue of its more scandalous moments gives a totally false impression of its overall qualities, and, particularly in the case of Salò, those moments are far from being the sine qua non of its existence. Much of the content may be obsessive and much of it indecipherable to a reasonably balanced mentality, but its construction is far from haphazard and its logic, on its own terms, perfectly coherent. That logic is summarised early on by one of the Fascist overseers: 'All things are good when carried to excess.' And Pasolini invites the viewer into a downward spiral of humiliation and degradation pursued to the ultimate extreme of eventual death….

[The] film is consistently pleasing to the eye, and Pasolini's mise-en-scène, visually discreet, mostly reliant on the long shot, and replete with controlled, geometric set-ups, is about as lip-smacking as a desiccated prune. A general heartlessness, a total unconcern for the individual, pervades the picture; this is not new in Pasolini, but some human concern would have given his scenario some justification…. Pasolini's grafting of Fascism on De Sade's theories is gratuitous at the least, but such deliberate provocation by the film-maker is rapidly neutralised by the steer monotony and obsessiveness of the argument. The film's thesis is made clear in the opening reel, and the remainder of the time is merely spent in demonstration and elaboration rather than development…. Pasolini was always a highly literary film-maker—and, for me, a writer and theoretician rather than a natural cinéaste—but in Salò even the literary artist plays second fiddle to private obsessions. The latent (and sometimes not so latent) homosexuality in his oeuvre here devours reason; the coprophilia and proctophilia is gloried in per se. No amount of wordy intellectualising can obscure the barrenness of Salò. In sum it is as pointless a waste of film stock as anything in the Confessions series.