Strange Invaders (Channel 9 Sunday at 6...

Strange Invaders (Channel 9 Sunday at 6 p.m.), an artful, 1983 tongue-in-cheek satire of science-fiction movies both of the ‘50s and the present, stars Diana Scarwid and Paul Le Mat.

Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 Das Boot (Channel 13 Sunday at 8 p.m.) is such a tense and stunning World War II adventure, set aboard a German U-boat on a dangerous mission, that its anti-war sentiments become all the stronger when we’re deliberately reminded at the finish that it’s been the Germans we’ve been rooting for.

Cheryl Ladd stars in the two-part, four-hour Bluegrass (CBS Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m.) as a woman struggling for success in the elite Kentucky horse-breeding set.

Perry Mason: The Case of the Avenging Ace, a new TV movie airing on NBC Sunday at 9 p.m., finds Raymond Burr, as Mason, defending a military officer (Larry Wilcox) he had sent to prison when he was an appellate court judge. Patty Duke co-stars.

Karel Reisz’ overwrought yet provocative 1978 Who’ll Stop the Rain? (Channel 7 Sunday at 9 p.m.) astutely observes the collapse of morality and the betrayal of self-worth experienced by idealistic Americans who were soldiers and wives during the Vietnam War. Michael Moriarty plays a burned-out intellectual who becomes involved in drug smuggling, Tuesday Weld is his strung-out wife and Nick Nolte is Moriarty’s best friend, whose crazed lost innocence reflects the spirit of the film.

Bullitt, that taut 1968 action film starring Steve McQueen as a San Francisco police detective assigned to guard a criminal witness, is back on Channel 5 Monday at 8.

Although scarcely a masterpiece, the 1973 Enter the Dragon (Channel 13 Monday at 8 p.m.) with Bruce Lee is still the definitive kung fu movie.

No sequel could be more dismal than Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.)--especially since the first was a good belly laugh. It’s painful to watch Steve Guttenberg et al. shot down by sheer wretchedness in this 1985 loser.

The new TV movie Perfect People (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) stars Lauren Hutton and Perry King as a middle-age couple intent on changing their looks and their lives through diet, exercise and plastic surgery.

There are some wonderful people and moments in Ragtime (Channel 5 Tuesday at 7 p.m.), but Milos Forman’s film of the infectious and ambitious E. L. Doctorow novel of those critical first two decades of the 20th Century has sheared away too much crucial connective tissue. The 1981 film, however, is a personal triumph for Howard E. Rollins, in his film debut, as a fatally optimistic ragtime piano player who eventually finds himself in opposition to James Cagney’s feisty police commissioner.

The Return of Ben Casey (Channel 13 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a new TV movie, brings back Vince Edwards as that tough, competent surgeon after a 22-year absence.

The stirring Chariots of Fire (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.) traces the parallel lives of two athletes--two men to whom running was a necessary part of life--who became part of the remarkable British track and field team at the 1924 Olympics. They were Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), a Jewish student at Cambridge to whom running became a weapon against anti-Semitism, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a Scottish divinity student whose will to run came from a passionate spirituality. This lyrical and unabashedly sentimental 1981 multi-Oscar winner deals with courage, gallantry and the price of a moral issue; director Hugh Hudson takes these abstracts and breathes life into them.

Blue Thunder (ABC Thursday at 9 p.m.), a chilling 1983 close-up look at police helicopter Big Brother surveillance, is a technically impressive, relentlessly manipulative film that leaves you both limp and angry. Roy Scheider stars as a maverick Los Angeles helicopter officer still suffering from Vietnam trauma, but the reasons for him or anyone else in the film to be a hero or a villain are ludicrous. We believe in the aerial dogfights, but the film’s basic disregard for human life is its undoing.

On a far different note, Channel 11 is presenting a pair of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Oklahoma! (Thursday at 7 p.m.) and Carousel (Friday at 7:30 p.m.).

Sam Peckinpah claimed his Killer Elite (Channel 13 Saturday at 8 p.m.) should be taken as a put-on. Maybe so, but this 1975 film seems a waste of the considerable talents of Peckinpah and James Caan, who heads a first-rate cast (which includes Robert Duvall) in what is a trite and murky formula thriller plot usually relegated to the less ambitious TV movies. Caan plays an agent for a shadowy CIA front organization.

If you haven’t seen it for awhile, Midnight Cowboy, with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as those memorably touching Times Square lowlife types, is an absorbing late show (Channel 13 Saturday at 10 p.m.).

Evening cable fare is highlighted this week on the Bravo channel by three early Hitchcock films: Blackmail (1929) (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.), Murder (1930) (Wednesday at 9 p.m.) and Young and Innocent (1937) (Friday at 8 p.m.).