This Weekend on Cable: Julianne Moore Headlines Your Worst Nightmare

This weekend on cable, nightmare scenarios proliferate like mushrooms -- and not the fun kind, either -- just to take your mind off the wars and natural disasters and the economy and global warming and...

Savage Grace (Sundance, Friday @ 1:35 AM)

A kind of so-rich-I'm-evil true story, released in 2007, about the 1972 murder of millionairess Barbara Daly Baekeland by her spoiled son, with whom she had a sexual relationship. Julianne Moore is the volatile, drunken victim, and while it may be tantalizing to consider Moore as your amoral, promiscuous mom, the son is Eddie Redmayne, who plays bitchy sociopath way too well and looks like an alien. So, no fun.

The Shout (TCM, Friday @ 3:45 AM)

Jerzy Skolimowski's 1978 adaptation of a Robert Graves story, and an unclassifiable feel-bad waking dream, in which utterly crazy Alan Bates infiltrates the tense marital life of John Hurt and Susannah York (with Tim Curry listening in!), armed with an Aboriginal shout that can supposedly kill. Then Skolimowski starts visually quoting Francis Bacon paintings, and you're on your own.

Nightmare Alley (Fox Movie Channel, Saturday @ 11:30 AM)

Edmund Goulding's infamous mega-noir, a dark act that dared already in 1947 to go all genre extreme and make long-lashed matinee hunk Tyrone Power into a shaky, chicken-head-biting rumpot circus geek. Joan Blondell watches the downfall from a semi-safe distance.

A Boy and His Dog (Flix, Friday @ 3:45 AM)

Everything will eventually be remade (except Nightmare Alley), and so will this cheap, strange 1975 version of Harlan Ellison's post-apocalyptic comedy about a guy (Don Johnson!) looking for tail in the wasteland, abetted by a mutt who can talk telepathically with Tim McIntire's voice. Back in the '70s, nuclear wasteland movies didn't come with a righteous moral, beyond this: Nuclear wastelands suck. But today we get The Book of Eli and... whatever they masticate Ellison into.

Shock Corridor (TCM, Saturday @ 10:00 PM)

Samuel Fuller's famous, claustrophobic, ultra-expressionist 1963 noir about a reporter masquerading as a mental patient and then, once he's trapped in the ward, going insane. You need to have seen it already; if not, tell no one and catch up.

Starting Out in the Evening (Sundance, Saturday @ 10:00 PM & 4:15 AM)

Hardly nightmarish, this grown-up indie centers on an aging, obsessive, out-of-print New York novelist (Frank Langella) suddenly beset by a luscious and ambitious grad student (Lauren Ambrose), who wants not only to write her master's thesis on him, but who also insinuate herself into his life, his history and his bed. The textures are sometimes coy (too much comfortable soundtrack piano doodling, too much should-be-satiric lit chat), but the story bumps into very sophisticated territory, and we get two enormously watchful actors. Langella is probably physically incapable by now of allowing any dialogue to sound trite, and when he rises to a boil, it's restrained, old-school performance thrills at their rarest.

The Yacoubian Building (Sundance, Sunday @ 11:30 PM)

This three-hour Egyptian epic -- the first to get a U.S. release -- is a massive Arabic soap opera, a Cairo-based Gone with the Wind swoony with mourning for a privileged colonialist past and with a melodramatic fascination for the bloody ideological conflicts of the present. Hammy, lavish and often thunderfooted, the movie is an immersion in particularized pulp and a rare window on Egyptian urbanity.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (IFC, Sunday @ 7:00 PM & 1:35 AM)

Gus Van Sant's absolutely disastrous -- and disastrously literal -- filmization of Tom Robbins's goofy bestselling farce about a wandering hitchhiker (Uma Thurman) with enormous thumbs. Thurman has big prosthetic thumbs, and they're not funny. At least they weren't in 1993; now, at 1:35 in the morning, the whole enchilada might be a riot.

Zandy's Bride (Encore Western, Friday @ 8:00 PM)

This gritty, broody, neglected American New Wave frontier western has been virtually cut from film history, but it's an adept piece of neo-realism as were made only in the '70s, with Gene Hackman (in the same year as Coppola's The Conversation, 1974) as a cold free-range hardass warmed up by his Swedish mail-order bride (Liv Ullmann). Directed by Jan Troell. Completists of the era step up; there is no DVD to rent, and God knows when it'll show up again.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (TCM, Saturday @ 4:30 AM)

Talk about nightmares. This big-budget, brown-Woodstock-acid 1953 adaptation of Dr. Seuss's story about the most horrific piano-lesson experience in history was made for kids, but it's far too scary and surreal-creepy for anyone except the gamest late-night potheads. And it's a musical! Note the time TCM is putting it on.