Stranger in the Alps

Day of the Outlaw (1959)   "Watch what happens to the women… watch the west explode!"   Man, the western-in-a-snow-landscape genre always has this bleak streak to it, it seems. This kind of under snowed western (pun intended) stars Robert Ryan as Blaise Starett , a coarse cattleman who operates in a small, remote town somewhere in Wyoming. He has a partner named Dan (Nehemiah Persoff ) who is getting jaded with Starett's rough ways, but stays with him because they've been through a lot together, or so is hinted at in the opening. Starett has developed a feud with local farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshall) over some barbed wire fences and is prepared to kill him for this rather insignificant quarrel. It quickly becomes clear this is not the actual reason he wants Crane out of the way, he has entertained an affair with Crane's wife Helen (Tina Louise) over the past few months and she isn't ready to leave her husband for h...

Fear X (2003) The bastard child in Refn's filmography. The ugly deformed misfit no one likes to speak of, the one they keep locked in the basement, where no daylight can reach it . It's kind of sad how this movie is mostly notorious for being the one that broke Refn's career, put him in an enormous debt and forced him to return to Denmark to make two sequels to his, at that point in his life, most successful movie, Pusher. Many people seem to dislike this movie and I can totally understand that. It is not cool like Drive is. It lacks the manic energy of Bronson. It’s a slow, idiosyncratic movie, that barely has a real plot to speak of. The entire thing reeks of pretentions. It is also 100% my kinda shit.   Just for those of you who have no idea what Fear X is about (which is a lot since not many people have actually taken the time to just sit down and watch it) . The movie revolves around Harry Caine (John Turturro), a security agent wo...