El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) (1960)

One of the great gags in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” has a direct reference to Luis Buñuel’s acid-to-the-face classic satire “The Exterminating Angel,” a nasty little tale that makes “The Lord of the Flies” seem quaint and targets the privileged class of Europe. The gist is wildly “Twilight Zone” simple: The servants at a lavish mansion are inexplicably leave their stations and the home just as a lavish dinner party begins, and never ends. For the same spirit, or psychological block, keep the guests trapped in one room. Food and water runs out, hygiene turns ugly, a man dies of a heart attack and his body rots, the hosts and guests – Sivia Pinal is the lead actress – go quite mad. Into animals, the kind these hoity-toity blue bloods described the working/lower class as in the film’s opening. Incest, drugs, witchcraft, demons, suicide and sheepacide (is that a word?) – nothing is off limits to Buñuel who saves his final daggers for The Church and The Military. It’s a dark, nasty, scathingly funny slab at the powers that be, the elite folks who place themselves on higher moral ground, closer to God, because they hold more wealth. A timely movie for sure. A