Halloween Week is upon us, starting with...
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Halloween Week is upon us, starting with From Beyond (KCOP tonight at 9), a 1986 shocker from Stuart Gordon, director of the 1985 cult classic “Re-Animator.” If you love movies with mad scientists, malfunctioning inventions and mysterious sensory organs that pop out of bug-eyed characters’ foreheads, then From Beyond is for you.
In Robert Mulligan’s sensitive, poignant 1962 film of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.) Gregory Peck won an Oscar for his splendid portrayal of small-town Southern lawyer defending a black man accused of rape.
Although Alligator (KTTV Monday at 8 p.m.), which was written by John Sayles and directed by Lewis Teague, has an exploitation picture’s mandatory quota of death and destruction, it has a wonderful saving sense of humor. Robert Forster plays a likable cop battling a very hungry, 2,000-pound, 36-foot alligator sloshing about a city sewer system.
The Man From Snowy River (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a broad but vigorous 1982 Australian Western, stars Kirk Douglas in a dual role.
As morbid as it is, John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is undeniably scary and suspenseful, even darkly humorous and by now a horror classic.
Just when you thought Dracula was down for the count, there’s the 1988 My Best Friend Is a Vampire (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m., Friday at 2 a.m.), a teen comedy variation on the Bram Stoker yarn.
Yet another Halloween entry, Tobe Hooper’s zany, energetic 1985 Lifeforce (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) envisions, among other mind-boggling phenomena, London being taken over by zombies. Steve Railsback stars.
The 1982 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.), which introduced bright, fresh talent on both sides of the camera, seems a movie with ambitions cut down to fit the rigid box-office formula that dictates as much sex and nudity that an R rating can sustain and decrees that teen-agers never have anything in mind but sex. Even so, it’s worth seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh as a Valley girl and Sean Penn as a boisterous, air-headed surfer.
KCET is offering two flamenco ballet collaborations between Spanish director Carlos Saura and choreographer-dancer Antonio Gades: a magnificent 1982 version of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding (at 9 p.m.) and an overly humorless 1983 Carmen (at 10:15 p.m.) in which Gades plays a choreographer who falls under the spell of his Carmen (Laura del Sol).
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