6. MAN’S BEST FRIEND?: This canine is no pal of mine.

Directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, who wrote it with Juan Antonio Porto and Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, this is the story of political prisoner and mathematician Aristides Ungria (Jason Miller, as good here as he was in The Exorcist). He’s been in jail for years when he gets the chance to escape. Earlier in the movie, we watch as an armed guard and his dog hunt down another prisoner and kill him. The same situation happens to Aristides, who kills the man and lets the dog live. Big mistake.

Yes, I realize, the dog is a tool of a corrupt system. But the dog is nature and a perfect predator and only knows that the man who raised him and commanded him, his alpha, is dead and that he has to kill the man who did this. So every time Aristides seems to get a chance to relax — or have sex with a woman named Muriel (Lea Massari) who helps him hide out — the dog shows up and destroys everything and everyone.

Even when he makes it back to the revolutionaries that he is a part of, there’s still danger. And still that dog, hunting and waiting and ready to kill. Miller looks quite frankly afraid for his life in every scene with the dog and he should be. It’s terrifying and this is coming from someone who had a one-eyed German Shepherd maul him as a child.

This dog is the same as a T-800, an unstoppable engine of fright and decimation. When the movie suddenly becomes told from his point of view, that’s the exact moment that my allegiance changed from the correct political side to the side of the animal. Any time you use a dog POV shot, you win me over, you know?

You can get this from Severin or watch it on Tubi.