It's more a Pink Flamingos than Salò for me. I need to watch it again (with sound and subtitles this time).

EDIT: Second watched yesterday, with audio and subtitles for all parts, because the variety of language, whether spoken or sung, is as rich as the acid humorous passages/sketches in this film.

When I say that for me it is closer to John Waters than Pier Paolo Pasolini, it would be in this present sense of "randomness" in the use of laughter in the most grotesque way possible - the so-called carnivalesque concept that Mikhail Bakhtin uses from his study of Rabelais' work (Gargantua and Pantagruel). There is the political side of Salò, but in the Italian production I didn't laugh as much as in Sweet Movie.

It is funny and even cruel with the proximity to death in the Katyn camps, but at the end it leaves a bit of hope, with the children coming out of the plastic bags, being reborn.