Bob Rafelson’s 1981 remake of James M....

Bob Rafelson’s 1981 remake of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (Channel 9 Sunday at 7 p.m.) got the Depression-era look just right, but Jack Nicholson’s Frank is too sleazy and ravaged to be fully convincing as the seducer of the young, beautiful and desperate Cora (Jessica Lange), stuck in her much older husband’s roadside sandwich joint.

The whimsical and poignant 1985 Back to the Future (NBC Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) finds small-town youth Michael J. Fox accidentally sent back 30 years, where to his chagrin he discovers his mother is crazy about him rather than his own father.

The new TV movie Where the Hell’s That Gold? (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.) stars Willie Nelson as a Confederate veteran who gets mixed up in transporting a trainload of gold to Texas.

Anyone who has ever tried to fix up any kind of residence will respond to the laughter of recognition that The Money Pit (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.) elicits, yet this overly exaggerated 1986 comedy isn’t as inspired or as funny as it should be. Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, however, are delightful as a young couple foolish enough to grab a purported million-dollar Long Island mansion for a mere $200,000.

Although the 1980 Alligator (Channel 11 Monday at 8 p.m.), which was written by John Sayles and directed by Lewis Teague, has all the familiar exploitation picture ingredients, it also has a wonderfully saving sense of humor. Robert Forster plays a likable cop battling a very hungry 2,000-pound, 36-foot alligator sloshing about in a Chicago sewer.

Too Good to Be True (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.) is a new TV movie remake of the memorable 1945 “Leave Her to Heaven.” Loni Anderson has the wicked Gene Tierney role, and Patrick Duffy is her key victim.

The most you can say for Police Academy 3: Back in Training (CBS Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a 1986 release, is that it’s no worse than “Police Academy 2,” which was awful. (Only the original in this never-ending series is really funny.)

In Brian De Palma’s Wise Guys (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m.) Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo are an anarchic Mutt and Jeff, the comic rockets that fuel this goofy 1986 sendup of a motley gang of mobsters so dim they probably would form a firing squad by standing in a circle.

The 1986 Karate Kid II (NBC Tuesday at 8:30 p.m.) is just as good as the 1984 original and finds Ralph Macchio’s Daniel accompanying his martial-arts mentor (Pat Morita) on a return, after a 45-year absence, to Okinawa, where both mayhem and Miyagi’s first love (Nobu McCarthy) await them.

In its seventh remake, Brewster’s Millions (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) casts Richard Pryor as an extremely minor-league pitcher who is stunned to learn that he’s the beneficiary of a bequest that requires him to spend a fortune in a month’s time or lose millions more. Unfortunately, this 1985 production isn’t nearly as funny as its star.

The 1980 Flash Gordon (Channel 5 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is pure entertainment, a perfect escape that transports us to an astonishing world of fantasy made real through awesome technical wizardry and unfettered imagination. It has humor, adventure, a handsome hero (Sam Jones), a beautiful heroine (Melody Anderson) and a wonderfully wicked villain, Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow).

A love of the world of movies permeates the crackling excitement of F/X (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m., again on Saturday at 10 p.m.), giving dimension to this sophisticated, savvy 1986 thriller about a Manhattan-based special-effects man (Bryan Brown), who’s been hired to stage a fake assassination of a Mafia kingpin (Jerry Orbach).