This Week On Cable: Inception's Inceptions

Still not over Inception? Please -- not only is it a Swiss cheese skyscraper with holes the size of loading-bay doors, it's not even terribly original, stealing first from Peter Ibbetson (1935), not on cable this week, and then from...

Dreamscape (Showtime Beyond, Thursday @ 6:45 PM)

Joseph Ruben's 1984 thriller tosses psych-study subject Dennis Quaid into others' dreams, which intersect with real-life conspiracies. Sound familiar? The dreams here are grotesque Tex Avery screaming mimis, and much more fun than Christopher Nolan's James Bond shootouts.

In Dreams (HBO2, Thursday @ 1:05 AM)

Neil Jordan tries his hand at the idea from the other end of the spectrum, having Annette Bening's dreams infiltrated and terrorized... by villain Robert Downey Jr.! Made in 1999, it's a truly nutty fruitcake of a movie that plays often enough like a crazy dream the filmmakers just can't wake up from.

Suspiria (Fox Movie Channel, Tuesday @ 12:00 Midnight)

Dario Argento's famous 1977 spatter-spookfest plays like it's all dream -- and the characters are trapped and at our subconscious mercy. If you're not familiar with it, get to be.

Solaris (IFC, Wednesday @ 6:15 PM)

With astonishing hubris, Steven Soderbergh remakes the Andrei Tarkovsky Soviet psycho-sci-fi opus three decades later (in 2002), and stunningly, it's better in some ways than the original: emotionally clearer, better acted (George Clooney swaps wounded gravitas for easy charm, and Jeremy Davies out-quirks the competition), unencumbered by Tarkovsky's exhausting longueurs. Nolan must've liked it, because he stole the entire suicidal-wife-won't-leave narrative right off the surface.

Reefer Madness (Showtime Beyond, Monday @ 7:15 PM)

This 1936 musty anti-dope polemic was made to scare Depression-era audiences, but, helplessly, only cracked up much hipper, and higher, viewers during some of the country's first "midnight movie" programs in the 1970s. Watching now, it's difficult to believe it wasn't conceived and executed by master satirists. Reputed to have been funded by a church group, but no one knows which.

Fail Safe (TCM, Wednesday @ 10:00 PM)

Unjustly overshadowed by Dr. Strangelove, also released in 1964 and based on the same premise, this white-knuckle drama of warhead face-off pits President Henry Fonda and the inept arms-race establishment around him against the Soviets, when bombs are sent to Moscow due to a malfunction. Grimly black-and-white, and playing like the most suspenseful early-TV drama ever staged, Sidney Lumet's movie is little more than talking heads, but it holds you in a vise.

Reuben, Reuben (Showtime Women, Tuesday @ 12:25 PM)

Peter De Vries's tragicomic novel about a thinly disguised Dylan Thomas-type poet on his last legs during an American reading tour gets the relaxed, literate comic-indie treatment (in 1983), with Tom Conti's weary Welsh drunk (an Oscar nomination) falling for a blue-blood college lass, played by Kelly McGillis.

John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (Cinemax, Tuesday @ 3:50 AM)

John Carpenter may be the last of a dying breed: a cheesy, puberty-suspended mad scientist filmmaker making the best of arrested development and modest ambitions, and longing to merely fill out a 1971 drive-in double bill. This already-forgotten 2001 pulp-wad involves Martian mining operations unearthing phantoms that possess the workers and turn them into an army of Marilyn Mansons. Ice Cube can't believe his eyes, or the movie he's in, which hilariously resembles the George Kennedy space opera on the editing table in Albert Brooks's Modern Romance.

The Norliss Tapes (Fox Movie Channel, Wednesday @ 6:30 PM)

Ah, the post-_Dark Shadows-Rosemary's Baby_ days when TV networks made full-length horror features (usually with the help of director/producer Dan Curtis), often as pilots for shows that were all too rarely picked up. (I don't remember 1971's Sweet, Sweet Rachel, but I vividly remember the nightmares it gave me.) This 1973 procedural, in which investigative journalist Roy Thinnes gets mixed up with Egyptian occultism and bloodsucking, has no conclusion, of course, which today makes it creepier.

Touch (Encore Love, Tuesday @ 4:10 PM)

An odd clash of personalities (between director Paul Schrader and source novelist Elmore Leonard) prevents this 1997 semi-satire from being the sharp-tongued pop-culture statement on faith healing we might've liked, but it's still a hoot. The story revolves like a merry-go-round around an unassuming twentysomething ex-monk/stigmatic (Skeet Ulrich), whose naive and secretive existence working in an LA rehab clinic begins to erode away once he unthinkingly restores sight to a blind woman in the presence of con-man Christopher Walken, in yet another one of the acts of vivacious movie theft for which he has become justly famous.