AS usual Friday night's viewing is nothing if not varied - although that variation refers to both quality and content.
Johnny Handsome (World 9.30pm, Original Running Time 94 minutes) is an odd film in which Mickey Rourke (Angel Heart) plays a hideously deformed habitual criminal, given the chance to start afresh when a prison surgeon performs cosmetic surgery.
Handsome happens to be in prison at the time, after being double-crossed in a robbery in which his best friend was killed and for which he was framed.
The film asks whether he would be a different person if he had a normal face, and this is put to the test when he infiltrates the gang who betrayed him - and who now can't recognise him. Will he hand them over to the police, or take his own revenge? A strong cast, which includes Ellen Barkin (Sea of Love), Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy) and Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime), helps maintain interest, though subtitles would be useful for the first half of the film to understand Rourke's authentic cleft-palate speech.
WORLD'S Mandarin movie is the multi award-winning Hibiscus Town (11.35pm, ORT 114 mins), one of the first mainland Chinese movies to look at the dark side of the Cultural Revolution.
The grim story centres on Hue Yueyin (Liu Xiaoqing) a beancurd seller accused of being a rich peasant during the Four Clean-ups of 1964. The accusation drives her husband to suicide and she is forced to sweep the streets.
Eventually she falls in love again, but it transpires that happiness is very hard to come by.