Amityville fatigue
THERE are seven films that bear the Amityville name, which is more than they have for episodes of TeleFISHion.
By the time Amityville - A New Generation (World, 9.35pm) was released, everyone, especially the critics, had got thoroughly bored with the idea and had given up writing about it. Amityville 3-D (which starred Meg Ryan) made it into some of the film guides, but Amityville - A New Generation is conspicuous by its absence.
The film comes with the advertising line 'the image of evil', a reference to the star, an antique mirror given to a photographer by a crazy homeless man. You know the rest.
The mirror does strange things and soon death and general mayhem is released in the photographer's house.
It all began, if you care to remember, with the original The Amityville Horror, which was based on a best-selling book of the same name by Jay Anson.
The book did not sell that well, but the publicists did not want to let the facts get in the way of a good slogan. The film had a not-half-bad cast.
Rod Steiger hammed it up as a local priest. James Brolin, Margot Kidder (Superman ) and Helen Shaver, who played Supergirl in Supergirl, also starred.
THE buddy-cop film Collision Course (World, 1.30am) is harmless, inoffensive and sometimes funny. It was made in 1987 and rose again in 1989 as Black Rain, which had a similar plot, but was much more violent, foul-mouthed and starred Michael Douglas.
In Collision Course Jay Leno is a police officer from Detroit who teams up with Pat Morita, a police officer from Tokyo, to investigate a car theft ring in America.
Morita is mild-mannered and refined. Leno is glib, erratic and chooses not to bother with rules. This is the cue for cultural misunderstandings.
Morita, the inscrutable martial arts teacher in the Karate Kid films, has to learn Japanese for the film. 'I had never spoken the language in my life,' he said. 'I do know something about karate, but the script does not call upon me to do any.' BAD jokes and bad acting prevail in Problem Child (Pearl, 9.30pm). The words 'absolutely fatuous' spring to mind.
John Ritter and Amy Yasbeck adopt a seemingly nice child who turns out to be behaviour-challenged; Bart Simpson with psychological problems.
Problem Child was produced by the same people who produced Robocop and Born On The Fourth Of July and that's the most interesting thing about it.
HERE'S your chance to catch Meg Ryan faking the big 'O' again and Billy Crystal shrinking in embarrassment as she does in When Harry Met Sally (Pearl, 1.25am), a scene that has and continues to thrill viewers over and over again. Definitely worth setting your videos for. DON'T watch The Trouble With Medicine (Pearl, 8.30pm) if you are planning major surgery. Its raison d'etre seems to be to undermine doctors. In this episode experts wonder if better diet might be the answer to some of the complaints we are usually dependent on expensive machines to cure.
MOVIES on Cable Movie Channel: Encounter Of The Spooky Kind II (11.00am). A girl's father plans to marry her off to a wealthy brat, but her boyfriend is having none of it.
Riff-Raff (5.00pm). From famed British director Ken Loach, known as much for his politics as his excellent films. This is set on a building site in Tottenham, north London, where itinerant labourers are refusing to join the union. Robert Carlyle and Emer McCourt star.
Woe Is Me (1.00am). The idea comes from a poem by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (long dead). Among the themes - anguish and pain, humanity, the follies of the human race, and so on.
Enemy Unseen (3.00am). A rogue soldier leads a mission to save a beautiful girl from a strange jungle.