Nobody wants them but everybody is watching: from time immemorial, animal fights have been as much looked down upon as they have been loved. “The Beast Within” pursues the reasons for man’s drive to have animals fight against each other. It picks up the trails of our martial instincts that lead into various cultures.

16-year-old Maria is forced into Serra D’Aires convent, secretly run by Satanists. Her confessor is in collusion with the Mother Superior. Maria is tortured, forced into sex with men, women, and the horned Devil, and told that it’s all a bad dream. She writes a letter to God, and a Knight rescues her, only to fall into the hands of the Inquisition, put on the rack, and condemned to death like Joan of Arc.

One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images.

A British multinational seeks to overthrow a vicious dictator in central Africa. It hires a band of (largely aged) mercenaries in London and sends them in to save the virtuous but imprisoned opposition leader who is also critically ill and due for execution. Just when the team has performed a perfect rescue, the multinational does a deal with the vicious dictator leaving the mercenary band to escape under their own steam and exact revenge.

Supported by a powerful mix of archival footage, NASA shots of burning oil fields, and, often unintentionally hilarious, historical film excerpts, OilCrash guides us on an exotic, visual journey from Houston to Caracas, the Lake of Maracaibo, the Orinoco delta, Central Asia’s secretive republic of Azerbaijan with its ancient capital Baku and the Caspian Sea, via London & Zürich. OilCrash visits cities around the world to learn of our future from such leading authorities as oil investment banker Matthew Simmons, former OPEC chairman Fadhil Chalabhi, Caltech’s head of physics, Professor David Goodstein, Stanford University political scientist, Terry Lynn Karl, peak oil expert, Matthew Savinar and many more.

Ilsa, now a vicious warden, runs a mental-hospital for young women. A girl deliberately “checks” in to the hospital to find out what has happened to her sister who stayed there. Meanwhile Ilsa and one of the guards are forcing the inmates to have sex with male prisoners, filming them and selling it as pornoflicks.

The first Franco/Erwin Dietrich effort is probably Franco’s most exploitive film with numerous sadistic scenes of torture and perversion. A true exploitation masterpiece that only a director like Franco could make. Maria (Lina Romay) is sentenced to prison for life for killing her father that attempted to rape. She is sent to a special section of the jail know for it’s cruel and sadistic treatment of prisoners. The wardress (Monica Swinn) is a sadistic lesbian who knows no mercy and takes pleasure in her job. Maria seduces a male nurse who she eventually kills in order to spring an escape from the hellhole. A must for all fans of sadistic WIP films and for Jess Franco addicts. Also stars Franco regulars Paul Muller, Martine Stedilm and Eric Falk.

A deaf and dumb accountant suffers from a psychic trauma in his childhood. He is collecting puppets and mutilates female bodies in the mortuary. After his secret love died by an accident he starts to kill.

A French grad student named Celine (Julie Delpy) meets an American boy named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) on the Budapest-Vienna train. They get off the train in Vienna and hang out for a while.

When an experienced thief accidentally makes off with a Van Gogh, his partner is kidnapped by gangsters in pursuit of the painting, forcing the criminal to hatch a rescue plan.