Border (Gräns) (2018)

There are lots of borders-between-things straddled by this Swedish movie - challenges to binary perspectives - and one of them is the line between it being completely ridiculous and not, and somehow the story of Tina, a border security guard who excels at her job because she can smell vice, always steers itself back from that brink; the movie, in which misfit Tina at last meets a kindred spirit and learns more about her true nature, is fascinating, challenging, emotional, beautiful, staggeringly original, and right the way through teeters on being - but never ends up being - utterly ridiculous.

★★★★☆

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Queen Of The Damned (2002)

The last embarrassment - the last nail in the coffin, so to speak - is the sight of Matthew Newton in a Paddlepop Lion wig trying to explain, in his only line right near the end, why one of the other vampires has turned to stone; I didn't hear what he said (the audio throughout is terrible) and, like me, you won't care anyway after this dreary adaptation of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book has everyone (notably Aaliyah and Keira Knightley -- oops I mean Stuart Townsend) trying so hard to be slinky, sexy vampires that watching it is like being the fully-clothed party guest at an orgy suddenly underway - you're not sure what you are still doing there, and everyone is so intent on what they are doing no one seems very interested that you're watching; filmed in part at an impressive-looking Mont Salvat in Melbourne, the Australian production forgets you are there and, worse, forgets to tell you what or who you should be rooting for: Lestat, the vampire who has woken himself up in the Noughties to become a nu metal rockstar, or humankind represented briefly by a beach violinist, a redheaded vampire researcher, and enthusiastic throngs at a metal concert - and no-one else - or perhaps we are supposed to care about some of the vampires and not others - Matthew Newton's, maybe, or the jazz-ballet-miming ones throughout?

★☆☆☆☆

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Burnt Offerings (1976)

It's The Shining before there was The Shining: a star-studded movie released in 1976, one year earlier than Stephen King's brick, about a writer (Oliver Reed), his wife (Karen Black) and their young son (Lee Montgomery) - oh, and Bette Davis as an aunt - who move into a holiday retreat (a summer rental too good and cheap to be true, not a hotel) and fall victim to strange goings-on - weirdness that probably stems from upstairs where the mysterious octogenarian Mrs Allardyce resides behind a closed door - but in this movie, the effect of this paranormality upon the family is just a whole lot of family bickering - whose dad hasn't played too rough with them in a pool? - and it doesn't just affect dad but first dad, then dad and mum, and then, weirdly, just mum who becomes house-obsessed - dad for some reason gets a reprieve - and then poor Bette Davis' aunt becomes ill...and all this not very scintillating stuff - fights then remorse then fights then remorse -  never ends up making a word of sense, so in that respect too Burnt Offerings is very much like The Shining.

★★★☆☆

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Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Terminator 2 was the best one, wasn't it, and so it is little wonder the floundering, misstepping series, having tried among other things forward time travel and making John Connor bad, has done a full-circle and with this 2019 episode is trying especially hard to emulate that second, 1989 one, featuring as it does a white-singletted tech-enhanced Sarah Connor lookalike leading the charge against a T-1000 lookalike (a liquid metal bot from the future with the requisite short dark hair, the tried-and-true steely look and some new tricks up its policeman-uniform sleeves) and the action happens on highways in trucks and helicopters, the drivers-seats of which the morphing bot slops into and out of a la Robert Patrick, and to help mark this movie as something more than a vacuous action retread, Arnie returns (and has one of the funniest lines of the entire series to date (<deadly serious> I said, 'Don't. Don't do it!') as well as Linda Hamilton, though perhaps she signed on very late into production - it appears very much like the young thing in her white singlet was originally intended as a Ripley B/ Sarah Connor B character, perhaps rewritten last minute?

★★★☆☆

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