This Week On Cable: Why Congo Deserves a Second Chance (Seriously)

Sometimes, the critics can be wrong, and let's face it: They weren't wrong about Robin Hood, as the millions of shrugging, bored ticket-buyers this past weekend can attest. They were wrong about Congo, and the millions of people who never saw it were wrong, too. That's right -- Congo, lost in the mists of big-movie past but found again this week on cable.

Congo (Outermax, Wednesday, 10:10 PM)

Who said Michael Crichton didn't have a sense of humor? He might not have, but director Frank Marshall sure did with this supersized 1995 fruitcake, which was also the first movie in which anyone noticed hotshot thesp Laura Linney. Does she need to live this movie down? Not on my ledger; I'll take it over her last five bitter-sensitive indies any day. Let's get this straight: A language-enabled gorilla (actually a Stan Winston robot!), a CIA agent, a hippo attack, a Delroy Lindo-led African revolution, King Solomon's mines, spontaneous sky-diving (talking ape included!), Tim Curry with an mouthy Eastern European accent thick as a wool rug, Bruce Campbell, and an underground onslaught of albino apes fended off with a laser gun that needs a giant diamond in it to run -- what, you want fries, too? Outrageous, surreal matinee hijinks, mistaken by most for a failed action film.

Scandal Sheet (TCM, Wednesday, 2:00 AM)

Based on Samuel Fuller's hot novel The Dark Page but directed by hardboiled hamhitter Phil Karlson, this classic noir has Broderick Crawford has a Park Row tabloid's bulldog editor, heading a newsroom that has only Donna Reed to recommend it in the way of moral compunction and compassion. The thorny patter and amoral brio proceeds apace until Chapman is confronted at a publicity event by a middle-aged woman who summons an entire unwanted past and gets whacked for her troubles. From there, the Rupert Murdoch-ian blowhard must cover his tracks even as his young star reporter (a regrettably bland John Derek) chases the story like a greyhound. A fast-gabbing, meat-eating show.

That Obscure Object of Desire (Sundance, Wednesday, 4:25 AM)

Señor Buñuel, our man Luis, in his autumn years, burps out his final masterpiece (in 1977) -- a quasi-surrealist farce in which a horny old aristocrat (Fernando Rey) marries a nubile version and then simply cannot find his way into her pants. Like some of Bunuel's best, it's like watching someone else's very bad dream of sexual frustration -- which, because it's not your bad dream, is ludicrously funny. But the greatest and meanest flourish is casting the girl with two actresses (Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet) who alternate but who do not resemble each other in the least, leaving Rey's maddened old coot lost in a mystery inside an enigma.

Last Night (Epix, Tuesday, 2:30 AM)

Made in 1999, Don McKellar's indie is easily the best millennial movie, an abstracted Canadian comedy in which there is no nighttime, everybody knows exactly when the world will end, and the only issue anyone faces anymore is what to do with the last day, the last evening, the last hour. Sandra Oh struggles to buy food for her and her husband's last dinner together but gets lost downtown. Callum Keith Rennie decides to satisfy his every sexual fantasy before midnight, including sex with his high school French teacher (Genevieve Bujold). David Cronenberg is a gas company exec whose obsessive project is to call each and every customer and leave a message assuring them of continued service. Family's relive past Christmases, others look for one last moment of connection.

Barb Wire (HBO Zone, Friday, 10:05 AM)

Well, maybe the critics and the filmgoers were right about this notorious bombshell, but what do they know? First off, you might think Pamela Anderson's 40-percent-or-so-synthetic chassis is all there is to recommend here -- bazooms and va-va-vooms, with a few ka-booms for tang. But you'd be wrong: The movie is a virtual scene-for-scene, gender-switched remake of Casablanca, with Anderson as Bogart. (Think about the beauty of that for a moment.) In this cheesy futureworld policed by retinal scans, the letters of transit become ID-masking contact lenses, Paris becomes Seattle, and Sydney Greenstreet becomes an obese crime kingpin hauled around in a payloader. Everyone from Conrad Veidt's SS rat to S.K. Sakall's cuddly waiter has a counterpart (Steve Railsback and Udo Kier, respectively). Tracking the interfaces is much more fun than listening to Pam speak, and anyway, as "covers" of Casablanca go, Barb's no less referential than Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam and far wittier than Sydney Pollack's Havana. Badly in need of a cult of its own.