The Exterminating Angel

My 1 star rating reflects the poor quality of this product, not the film (which is among the greatest of all time).


Bunuel's BEST - and that's saying quite a lot.   August 27, 2004
Donkey Dick (Blubber Land)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

A brilliant concept if I've ever heard one, Bunuel's finest film involves a group at a dinner party who are inexplicably unable to go home. Absolutely nothing is holding them back -- doors are unlocked, there are no barriers -- but they just can't leave the house. Kind of a precursor to Godard's 1967 masterpiece, WEEKEND, we then witness socialites and the upper-class reduced to barbaric acts of desperation. Although Bunuel claims ANGEL has no literal meaning, his contempt for the rich has never been more obvious, and he would return to similar terrain with 1972's DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, where dinner guests find themselves unable to sit down and eat. Subtle surreal touches round off this film, as random scenes repeat for absolutely no reason and sheep run about the house; not to mention the frustratingly incomprehensible yet inexplicably appropriate final scenes.


HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.   October 12, 1998
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

When invited guests arrive for an elegant dinner party and find themselves unable to leave the dining room, Spanish surreal master Luis Bunuel, enters the undeworld of human desires and relations, peeling the crust of the burgoeis thinking and emancipating the subconcious of all the characters. After three days, hunger, thirst and desperation take over, leaving the semi-savage guests to undergo a formidable transformation of both, mind and spirit. After hearing the disturbing news, the social institutions (police, army, politicians, even other citizens) are unable to even enter the house, moved by the same invisible force. Filmed in 1962 and considered by many his greatest surreal film after L'age D'or, Exterminating Angel gives Bunuel a chance to go back to his cultural roots of the French Surrealism, not allowing culture, education, religion or other institutions to interfere with the content of characterization but to allow his characters to roam free like dreams or sometimes nightmares in a world of pre-fabricated emotions.

Arthur A. Sabina New York END


Masterwork   March 4, 2003
David A. Roman (Los Angeles, CA)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

The film's central characters are overcome by their bourgeois sense of propriety and, due to pretense, are seemingly trapped in an opulent parlor room by their incapacity to overcome their own outrageous forms of hypocritical propriety. The inability to leave the dinner party first grows to absurd proportions leading to the inability of all attendees to leave at all. They are psychologically impaired and degenerate, slowly, into their basest elements until they realize, collectively, that escape is possible.

Rejecting rationalism, and accessing the unconscious desires of mankind, is at the heart of this film. The constructs of man, the masks of artifice he appropriates, are fashioned out of rationalism and serve to obfuscate reality. Man becomes pretentious, corrupt, immoral, and despondent because he has lost sense of himself. For Bunuel, the bourgeoisie is ripe for attack, given that they shape and determine the values of their society. If our social leaders reject true humanity, then how can society hope to find truth? For Bunuel, humanity cannot thrive under such conditions. Hell is divestiture from the self.

This film is for anyone who enjoys an intelligent and beautiful film (Cinematography by Mexican master Gabriel Figueroa). Bunuel is clearly one of the greatest pillars of modern film.


The real Surreal   February 8, 2000
Tom Draper (Pittsburgh, PA United States)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

For those of you who have never seen a Luis Bunuel film, The Exterminating Angel is both an excellent beginning and one of his very best.

The famous dinner party. The guests that can't leave. The animals (human and otherwise). The dark house. The repeating scenes. All this and more await you.

But it's the camera work that really leaves no doubt that we are seeing the work of a master of masters of the cinema. LB moves right and left, in and out without changing the lens setting, which sets up an erie feeling in perfect relationship to the subject matter of the film. A film not to be missed, and a movie to take a chance on. You won't be disappointed.