No respite for the bored
WARNING: watching TV tonight could be very bad for your health. Apart from the usual Friday favourites of Cheers and Murphy Brown, just about everything else has come out of the ''absolute dross'' basket.
Take for instance Pearl's main movie The Tunnel (9.45 pm, Original Running Time 99 minutes), starring Jane Seymour (Somewhere in Time) as a married woman and Peter Weller (Robocop) as her obsessive lover.
It's soporific stuff, and even the extensive nudity and sex, which presumably once livened things up a little, will have been removed.
FOR your delectation on World there's an even worse nightmare, a Jean Claude van Damme classic Cyborg (9.30pm, ORT 86 mins).
The time - wouldn't you know it - is the near future and van Damme (Universal Soldier) plays hero and soldier of fortune Gibson Rickenbacker - with a name like that how could he fail? He's protecting a cyborg whose computer brain holds the answer to a deadly plague that's stricken the earth. But they're up against the evil Fender Tremolo and his band of Flesh Pirates.
Ho hum.
THERE may be some hope in Counterstrike (Pearl, 8.35pm), a new series described as an action adventure yarn revolving around an elite crime-fighting trio.
Christopher Plummer - star of The Sound of Music, The Return of the Pink Panther and numerous mini-series - appears in his first TV series proper as an eccentric billionaire determined to destroy evil wherever he finds it. He is the man who gives the trio their assignments.
Simon MacCorkindale plays Peter, ''a legend in law enforcement circles around the world''; Cyrielle Claire (Sword of Gideon) is Nicole, the safe-cracker; and Stephen Shellen (Hollywood Wives) is anti-terrorist expert Luke.
It doesn't sound too original does it? NEITHER is Hongkong Originals (World, 7.30pm), which is a repeat of the series shown, until a very few weeks ago, on Sundays.
WANG Tung directed World's late night Mandarin film, Run Away (12.20am, ORT 114 mins). Set 700 years ago, it is the story of the ageing leader of a gang of robbers torn between settling down with the woman he loves and continuing his violent lifestyle.
He knows his gang is no longer invincible, and that the opposing force is becoming stronger, but he wants to try one last major robbery.
THAT just leaves Shadow of Death (Pearl, 12.30am) and The Blue Iguana (also on Pearl, 2.05am), neither of which is worth burning the midnight electricity for.
The first stars Anthony Perkins (Psycho) as a movie director filming in a maximum security prison closed a year earlier because of a violent riot, in which the jail's nastiest inmate, a serial killer, died.
Except of course he didn't, as Perkins' girlfriend (Deborah Foreman) discovers when she comes face to face with him in the deserted prison.
Not even a hilarious cameo by Dean Stockwell (Married to the Mob) can save The Blue Iguana, a poor spoof about a down and out bounty hunter on a mission to recover $20 million from notorious bandits in Mexico.
