In Rambo III (World, 9.30pm) the third and thankfully the last movie in the Rambo season, the brawny hero is persuaded to come out of seclusion in a Thai monastery to knock heads for the American military once more. This time John Rambo is sent on a mission to stop the antics of a particularly malevolent Russian general who is causing unimaginable havoc in a remote corner of Afghanistan. There is a delightful and probably unintentional symmetry to this storyline because the Russian occupation of Afghanistan had the same impact on a generation of Russians that Vietnam had on an earlier generation of Americans. It was the same unwinnable, misguided, brutal mess fought by conscripts who came home not as heroes but as alienated outsiders ordinary Russians did not understand. Last week, Rambo was being strung up by a sadistic Russian in Vietnam on the grounds that he was an American spy who wanted to interfere with Vietnamese attempts to try Americans for wartime atrocities. This week, he is fighting the same enemy, only this time the Russians aren't just providing military assistance, and torturing poor American GIs, they are occupying another nation and torturing poor Afghans. The late-night film Stunt Seven (Pearl 1.15am) is so awful that it is surely only screening at all because of some tedious contractual obligation. It stars Elke Sommer as a film star who is so bad at her job, that when she is kidnapped midway through a film, the studio decides it is cheaper to get someone else than to pay the ransom. This is not the kind of response kidnappers like to hear: the whole point about snatching a victim has to be that someone rich cares enough to get them back. Unfortunately for two Hong Kong men who are still in captivity in the Philippines, there are some kidnappers in real life as inept as the ones in the movie. So Chi-ming and Law Cheung-yau were kidnapped in September along with a Malaysian co-worker, while working on a seaweed and abalone farm in Sitangkai, Sulu. The kidnappers were apparently under the impression that they had nabbed three captains of industry. Instead they got three employees of a Hong Kong businessman Ben Yu, who has been reluctant so far to pay the 1.5 million pesos (HK$285,000) originally demanded. The fact that Mr Yu wouldn't pay and the families of the victims couldn't, did not stop the kidnappers from issuing a pathetic video tape of their victims, and a message at the end of October. In it they said that their expenses had increased to one million pesos and as a result they could not possibly accept a peso less than two million. It would be farcical if three men weren't still being held hostage: a bunch of half-baked extremists so incompetent that they not only snatch the wrong men, but actually believe bringing up the extra costs they have incurred in doing so should be met by the victims.
