Critter discomfort
DO not worry if you have not seen Critters and Critters 2: The Main Course. It will not take you long to pick up the story. For the really stupid, it goes something like this: aliens with bad orthodontal work have landed on Earth and are causing a certain amount of chaos by eating people. That, really, is it. Critters 3 (Pearl, 9.30pm) picks up where the other two left off.
This is a low-budget Towering Inferno , without the fire. The Critters enter a rundown urban apartment building and chase the inhabitants upwards. The moral, if you can call it that, is that the fanged furballs have learned their anti-social behaviour from watching too much rubbish on American television.
There are uncanny similarities between the Critters films and Gremlins. You might go so far as to say the former is a rip-off of the latter. But of all the Critters films this is perhaps the best. It is helped, not hampered, by its cheapness. If it had been well-made there would be more to criticise.
One more movie followed before the script-writers, not before time, ran out of story.
IT took them longer to run out of story with the Apes series. After Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (World, 9.30pm) came the television series and after that came the cartoon.
Battle is the fifth and last of the films. It is better than numbers two, three and four, but not half as good as the original, which starred Charlton Heston.
This one stars Roddy McDowall as the articulate simian. Director J. Lee Thompson tries to bring the series full cycle, but instead plunges it into self-parody.
THE synopsis for Celebrity Fitness (World, 1.40am) brings banality to new depths. 'Her heart pounded . . . Her pulse raced . . . Beads of sweat trickled down her taut, tanned body . . . She was . . . a really healthy celebrity!' This is the same Celebrity Fitness that was shown on World on Saturday evening and it does not improve with repeated viewing.
Among those features are Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnie, Jane Fonda and their personal trainers.
THE synopsis for The Asian Wall Street Journal Report (Pearl, 8.30pm) contains a delightful Freudian slip. The mid-term elections in the US, it says, might bring weeping changes to the country. Consuelo Mack reports on whether a more conservative Congress will change the climate for business and trade.
Closer to Hong Kong, but not too close, is a story on Indonesia, where in order to attract tourists the government is destroying many of the things tourists go there to see.
Then there is that old chestnut, the second-hand smoking debate. Can someone else's smoke kill you? THERE are more current affairs programmes on Monday evenings than you could shake a big stick at. 20/20 (Pearl, 8.55pm) comes from the US and is hosted by Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. The Pearl Report (Pearl, 7.15pm) is Pearl's rival to Inside Story (World, 8.30pm), once edited by Sally Round and now edited by Susan Yu.
Inside Story has three reports, one of which will be of interest to anyone who has ever sneaked away from their desk for a quick smoke in the office toilets. It examines employee surveillance in Hong Kong companies and the extent to which companies are monitoring their worker ants. It's a subject, says Yu, that highlights the problem of balancing security concerns with an employee's right to privacy.
Policewomen in Hong Kong are being given more operational responsibility and to celebrate, or commiserate, Inside Story joins one rookie on the beat.
The final report is from China, where Hong Kong kids used to a life of Big Macs and Nintendo are getting lessons in discipline from a disciplined source, the People's Liberation Army.
THERE are familiar names in A Shadow On The Sun: The Life Of Beryl Markham (STAR Plus, 9pm), the story of the first woman pilot to cross the Atlantic. Stephanie Powers plays Markham and James Fox her wealthy husband. Also in there somewhere are Timothy West, Peter Bowles, Juliet Stevenson and Trevor Eve (remember Shoestring? ).
