This Weekend on Cable: A Knight's Tale, and 8 Other Trips to the Hollywood Outskirts

This weekend, the best cable choices range from guilty pop-culture indulgences to guilt-free pop-culture joyrides, and either way it beats blowing a fitty on Sex and the City 2. Many other things, like passing a star-shaped kidney stone, would beat that, too, of course, but the point isn't hard to get.

I'm a Cyborg But That's OK (Sundance, Friday @ 12:00 midnight)

Fans of Korean hair-raiser Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy and vampire saga Thirst probably won't quite know what to do with this loopy 2006 romance, in which love impossibly blooms between a schizophrenic and a girl who thinks she's a battle-droid - complete with daydream sequences of wicked carnage. But Park's fans shouldn't and probably won't resist, since it never saw Stateside theaters.

The Mysterious Island (TCM, Friday @ 8:00 PM)

This is the rarely-shown 1929 version of Verne's novel, and though it has little to do with Verne, it does have a giant octopus, dwarf sea people, an alligator posing as a dinosaur, and snippets of early synch-sound. Antique retro-pulp of the first order, with Lionel Barrymore and Montagu Love.

A Scanner Darkly (Starz Cinema, Sunday @ 11:40 PM)

Richard Linklater's pitch-perfect, disorientingly CGI-rotoscoped 2006 adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel tracks Keanu Reeves as a near-future narc who becomes addicted to a new drug and may, he suspects, be chasing himself. Never got the hallelujahs it deserved, largely because everyone expected science fiction, Matrix-y or otherwise, and got something altogether stranger.

Hair (HBO, Saturday @ 7:55 AM)

Milos Forman's 1979 production of the deathless hippie musical, shot in Central Park (and elsewhere), and a free-flowing geyser of goofy, sun-drenched all-American popness, already nostalgic for an era that's not even seven years gone.

The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy (TCM, Friday @ 2:15 AM)

Infamous maybe most for its title, this 1958 Mexican horror hack job doesn't have a masked wrestler in it. Nevertheless, once you've seen it, you can consider yourself a seasoned veteran of mid-century Mexican grindhouse flicks.

A Knight's Tale (HBO, Saturday @ 6:35 AM)

Lighter, wittier and more original than it had a right to be, Brian Helgeland's meta-costumer has charm to burn (courtesy of Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany). But it should be famous for its outrageous musical anachronisms: Queen, BTO, etc., used as dance numbers. As the film ambles on, what seemed absurd and misguided becomes a joyous riff. You end up waiting to see how far Helgeland will push it -- all the way to a medieval ball in which the music slowly segues into David Bowie's "Golden Years" and the dancers end up raving. Think of it as a live-action version of Friz Freleng's Knighty Knight Bugs.

Major Dundee (TCM, Saturday @ 3:00 PM)

Outlaw director Sam Peckinpah's first patently runaway-train production, this 1965 mega-western bristles with as much studio-epic, Ford-style cliche as with New Wave anarchy. Charlton Heston's the titular megalomaniac officer leading a batch of prisoner soldiers on a manhunt into Mexico, and you can count on the fact that the veering, drunken, violent trip parallels the odyssey Peckinpah and his crew took making it. Richard Harris warms up center stage as a smirking rebel, but behind him lurk a who's who of growling, man's-man character stars: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, James Coburn, and so on.

A Nous la Liberte (TCM, Sunday @ 2:15 AM)

The classic, must-see summer idyll masterpiece to beat them all, Rene Clair's 1934 fantasy pits romantic anarchists against capitalistic machination in a way Chaplin ripped off as few years later for Modern Times (he settled the lawsuit out of court). I envy you if you haven't seen it yet, and do, and the spring is treating you well.

Evil Dead 2 (IFC, Saturday @ 12:00 midnight)

Sam Raimi's 1987 cheapskate zombie show might be the most beloved and imitated indie genre film of the last 40 years, and there's no question as to why: Using merely a house in the woods and an uncorked cartoon soul, it packs more visual lunacy and Tex Avery esprit into each foot of film than any 10 other movies of its decade. Today, Raimi is a millionaire franchise CEO, but once, he was a supercollider of pulp energy.