Episodes 9 and 10 of The Vietnam War on BBC4 from 10 p.m. on Monday 23rd October.
The Indian film season returns to its previous slot with
The Dirty Picture on Channel 4 at 1.50 a.m. on Tuesday 24th October.
Film4 have their usual horror season for Halloween next week, with a rare repeat showing of Candyman (the first in around five years) at 11.15 p.m. on Friday 27th October, and two premieres:
A Dark Song at 11.15 p.m. on Wednesday 25th October (in a double bill with the The Babadook) and
Tank 432 at 11.35 p.m. on Thursday 26th October (in a double bill with Yakuza Apocalypse).
And the Sony Movie Channel has the first showing of
Chinese Zodiac starring Jackie Chan (which the Radio Times pithily describes as a "Largely incomprehensible adventure"!) at 6.20 p.m. on Saturday 21st October.
In terms of repeats, for John Hughes fans Sixteen Candles is tucked away at 1.25 a.m. in the early hours of Saturday 28th October on the 5 Star channel. And Film4 have a rare screening of the 1959 Douglas Sirk version of Imitation of Life at 11.00 a.m. on Thursday 26th October. But the film that most caught my eye is one of my favourite guilty pleasure disaster movies,
Crack In The World, showing on Film4 at 11 a.m. on Sunday 22nd October (in an amusingly cheeky double bill with the more recent goofy Earth science film The Core! That's an example of film scheduling as film criticism right there!) and again at 4.40 p.m. on Friday 27th October. Its a 'guilty pleasure' because I love the kind of worldwide disaster film which follows the privileged characters watching global meltdown from a safely distanced perspective only for them to suddenly have to suddenly fight for their lives in the final act (that structure is kind of why I have a soft spot for the equally ridiculous Meteor too!), but unfortunately this film was seemingly made before the concept of plate tectonics was common knowledge so the entire premise, about experimental bomb tests accidentally fracturing the Earth's crust and causing a chain reaction of a single fault line racing across the planet from the epicentre, is a bit ludicrous now! Its no When Worlds Collide (still the ultimate disaster movie!) but if you can watch something like First Man Into Space (which was immediately outdated as soon as the first astronauts went outside of the Earth's atmosphere and
didn't come back as a homicidal mutant!), then I suppose that this isn't too problematic either, and just viewed as a disaster movie with a fun climax I can recommend it as a entertainingly bleak watch! (Though of course something like The Day The Earth Caught Fire from around the same time is a much more sober look at global disaster!)
Crack In The World headlines Dana Andrews (who had form in disaster movies with Zero Hour! before this, and Airport 1975 after), but co-stars Janette Scott and Kieron Moore, both of whom had starred in the 1963 version of The Day of the Triffids a couple of years before this, for the same producer, Philip Yordan, who produced the 1964 version of The Thin Red Line in between! (And the director of that version of The Thin Red Line, Andrew Marton, was the director of Crack In The World!) Scott and Moore are both isolated together in the best section of that film adaptation of The Day of the Triffids too, as the couple trapped in their lighthouse fighting off the local fauna!
I also have a sneaking suspicion that Tim Burton might have paid tribute to the moment at the end of this film (in which amongst all of the mind-bogglingly irreversible natural disasters going on and against blood red skies, a small animal appears as if to show the two survivors that everything isn't entirely hopeless) at the end of Mars Attacks! Just replace Janette Scott and Keiron Moore hugging each other for Tom Jones belting out his greatest hit to his wildlife audience!