SATURDAY
The Lost Boys (1987)
Space, 11:15 p.m. Remember how much you laughed when you were a teenager? And remember how dismal the whole experience was? On its way to delivering some good scares, The Lost Boys captures the light and dark that dance through adolescence, interchanging perceptive comedy with downer mood swings from scene to scene. It's a classic story of the new kid in town (Jason Patric) and the peer pressure he feels, except that in this town the peers are a gang of vampires. Led by a punky Kiefer Sutherland, the gang also includes a pretty girl, so the new boy can't just write them off, even when other kids (including Corey Feldman) obliquely warn him of the possible risk to his arteries. As the boy's divorced mother, Dianne Weist delivers her usual perfect performance, gingerly feeling her own way through new surroundings while trying to figure out why her son is acting so bloody weird.
SUNDAY
Badlands (1973)
Showcase, 11 p.m. There's a surreal breeziness to Badlands, given that it's based on a real-life story about a man who shoots his girlfriend's father - dad disapproved of her courting a sanitary engineer - and then fled with her on a murderous rampage whose final tally hit 11. Martin Sheen is the guy, named Kit, and based on Charles Starkweather. Sissy Spacek is Holly, based on Caril Ann Fugate. Compared to its frenetic predecessor, Bonnie and Clyde, or that 1990s Juliette Lewis bloody duo of Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers, Badlands makes serial killing look borderline somnambulistic. Spacek spends much of the movie with her head buried in fan magazines. Sheen's in a warp of his own, staging his death to achieve maximum cult status. The effect is interesting: These psychos, you realize, don't seem to realize they are, in fact, nuts. Sound like any psychos you know? Like, maybe, every psycho you know?
MONDAY
Mary Poppins (1964)
Family, 9 p.m. The execrable Judging Amy had a recent episode in which the good judge laments that her daughter learns her first recipe from The Three Stooges. Mary Poppins is an early whimper for the latch-key kid, with Julie Andrews serving as the catalyst that brings together a family whose offspring have been ignored by banker dad and suffragette mom. In her first feature, Andrews scored an Oscar, and Dick Van Dyke shows how much dancing aplomb was behind his famous opening-credits ottoman tumble on The Dick Van Dyke Show. If the whole thing seems too darn clean cut for you (and shame on you if it does) keep an eye out for MAD TV reruns in which Mary terrorizes a clutch of dark-skinned servants with songs like "Just a few illegal aliens help the housework get done" and "The immigration and naturalization service, even though the sound of it can make you feel quite nervous"
TUESDAY
The Man in the Attic (1995)
Showcase, midnight What a bunch of weirdos, based on real-life weirdos at that. Neil Patrick Harris, formerly little Doogie Howser, M.D., plays Edward, who at the film's opening is languishing in prison, where, the guard informs a reporter who's come to hear his story, "he showers three or four times a day the cleanest murderer we ever had."
(Why this is relevant is never made entirely clear.) Anyway, Edward has spent the last several years hiding in the attic of his lover, Krista (Anne Archer). He got there after Krista's husband - Edward's boss - discovered them making love.
The guy fires Edward, but Krista comes up with a great idea for free room and board: her attic! Penniless Edward thinks this is a brilliant idea, and moves in for a couple of decades. But when Krista takes on a new lover, Edward freaks and all hell breaks loose. Edward ends up in prison, and those mysterious showers begin.
WEDNESDAY
Three to Tango (1999)
Citytv, 1 p.m. Maybe if all women, when they first meet guys, thought they were gay guys, all relationships would have an easier time getting off the ground. In Three to Tango, Dylan McDermott is a rich man who controls a condo-development project coveted by Matthew Perry. Because Perry's business partner is gay, McDermott thinks Perry is gay. So he assigns Perry to keep watch on his mistress, Neve Campbell. This allows Perry to watch her take baths, and the two of them to talk openly and eat bad restaurant food and deal with crazy cabbies, with nary a sexual-predator worry from her side. How could she not fall in love? He's a guy watching Neve Campell take baths. How could he not fall in love? The title, by the way, has nothing to do with anything; the movie is frothy, garbled fun.
THURSDAY
Alien Fury: Countdown to Invasion (2000)
Space, midnight These days you can almost see it happening: A Pentagon bureaucrat's budget is about to be slashed, so he concocts a hoax to convince America that aliens are colonizing the far side of the moon. But is it a hoax? That ends up being a darn good question, because behind closed doors, someone (we only see their hands of course) is communicating with real aliens over the Internet (aliens, mysteriously, who have crisp British accents). The typist doesn't seem to be our bureaucrat (Dale Midkiff, the dad in Pet Sematary), although his wife isn't so sure. She has evidence that hubby is boinking a voluptuous blonde co-worker. Could the counterspy be the blonde? Could it be the wife? Could it be the handsome police detective who's following the case? Could it be the Amazon woman with the stun gun? And what constitutes an alien, anyway, you're left wondering, even more than on a normal day.
FRIDAY
Spartacus (1960)
Bravo!, 7:30 p.m. Like the fed-up but spirited woman who, goes the legend, sparked Poland's Solidarity movement by handing out pamphlets outside the factory at which she worked, Spartacus is a story of oppression distilled into anger, then fighting back, then unity in the name of dignity. A rippled Kirk Douglas stars as the slave of the title, galled by the demand that he fight another gladiator to the death simply to entertain a couple of ruling-class wives. An epic if ever there was one, it's become notorious over the years for its bisexual subplot involving power-hungry Laurence ("I like both oysters and snails") Olivier and slave Tony Curtis. Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons and an Oscar-winning Peter Ustinov round out the all-star cast of a film whose story, like Solidarity's, is one of inspiration, glory, and setbacks big and small.