This Weekend on Cable: Crash Drives Home the Cult of Cronenberg

This weekend, amid the stagnant sea of my-God-not-The-Mummy-Returns-again cable movies, the grade-A options are split between the usual-suspect channels and the channel offshoots no one pays attention to. Read on for your carefully curated guide featuring work from fish-monsters to fetishes and beyond, and set your recorders accordingly.

TCM rolls out a few beauties: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (Sun., 2:00 AM) and the rarely seen grade-Z fish-monster cheeseball Zaat. Otherwise known by eight alternate titles, it's ready for tweekers tonight at 2:00 AM. But this evening -- at 5:30 PM -- King Vidor's bizarrely majestic The Fountainhead rears its lofty, Darwinian head once again, just in time for the recent Ayn Rand arguments to fade. Really, it's a beautiful film mostly in retrospect, when you can look back at its arguments for acts of domestic destruction in defense of egomania and find them adorable. One can only wonder, with a chill, what that new film version of Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged will be like, if it ever gets made.

On IFC, David Cronenberg's Crash (Sun. 11 PM) is the kind of film that carves out its own exclusive territory in the cultural forebrain and dares us to cross its border. Following the original novel by J.G. Ballard closely, the scenario's thrust is obsessively simple: A portrait of a tribe of deeply miserable people compulsively aroused by death and its proximity, defined with adroit precision by Ballard as that most singularly insane by-product of modern convenience, the car crash. Set amid the anonymous asphalt deserts of Toronto (an improvement, at least visually, over the novel's English landscape), the movie tracks Jim Ballard (James Spader) as he experiences a devastating car crash and, upon recovering, plunges into a joylessly sexual exploration of his experience and of car wrecks in general. The film's clincher is the postmodern rut between Ballard and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a brace-supported wreck victim whose monstrous, vaginal leg scar becomes the ultimate orifice. And there's a heartbreaker of an ending that beats the book's nihilism to the ground.

Meanwhile the HBO sidecar outlets are predictably unpredictable. Amid the deathless reruns of yesterday non-blockbusters, HBO Zone lets William Friedkin show them all how it's done with his 1985, star-free policier To Live and Die in L.A. (Sun., 3:30 PM) Likewise, HBO Signature presents Douglas Sirk's classic wide-screen melodrama-spectacle Imitation of Life (1959) early Saturday (6:00 AM), and it'd be hard to find an antidote to modern Hollywood chick flicks that is as rampant with passion, conviction and the-image-is-the-story reverb.

Starz Cinema gives you a glimpse of Jiri Menzel's 2006 sex farce I Served the King of England (Friday, 11:45 PM), which essentially pits Nazism and totalitarianism against cunnilingus, gourmet cuisine and money, with the "-isms" on the losing end. And check if you have Encore Action, because Tsui Hark's last great splooge of Hong Kong action nitro, 2000's Time and Tide, shows up Saturday morning at 10:45 AM. While the story barely makes sense, the non-digital, all-real stunt action can knock the air out of you.