True Believer (KCOP tonight at 8:30 p.m.)...

True Believer (KCOP tonight at 8:30 p.m.) piles coincidence onto improbability and cliche onto unlikelihood in this 1989 film about the redemption of a flamed-out ex-’60s activist turned cocaine dealer (James Woods).

In his zany, hilarious 1976 Silent Movie (KCAL tonight at 9), Mel Brooks plays an old-time movie director who believes that making a silent movie is just the thing to save Sid Caesar’s studio from the giant conglomerate Engulf & Devour.

In Ron Howard’s 1984 hit romantic comedy Splash (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m.), Tom Hanks falls in love with mermaid Daryl Hannah.

The stylish and suspenseful 1987 Predator (KTTV Wednesday at 8 p.m.) finds Arnold Schwarzenegger heading a military rescue unit in the jungle of a nameless Latin American country and coming up against an evil alien.

In the 1987 Dragnet (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.), a spoof of the old radio and TV series, Dan Aykroyd is fine as Joe Friday’s officious, super-square nephew as is Tom Hanks as his swift-witted foil, but the film goes over the top with a plot involving virgin sacrifices and pagan ritual.

Mel Brooks’ 1987 movie parody Spaceballs (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) satirizes space opera, primarily the “Star Wars” trilogy and its merchandising empire but is engulfed by its own super-spectacle morass.

La Bamba (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), Luis Valdez’s 1987 film biography of ‘50s rock ‘n’ roller Ritchie Valens is as infectious as its music, an irresistible saga of how a teen-age Mexican-American (Lou Diamond Phillips) made it from a migrant farm worker background to three hit records at the age of 17. Especially memorable is Esai Morales as Ritchie’s troubled older half-brother.

In the powerful 1987 HBO production Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (KCET Friday at 9 p.m.) a glittering cast reads the actual words of soldiers and nurses serving in Vietnam, which in turn are matched in impact with Vietnam footage by director Bill Couturie.

Above the Law (CBS Saturday at 8 p.m.), the 1988 cop thriller that launched martial arts star Steven Seagal, is something of a standoff: good in excitingly grimy Chicago atmosphere and terse, hard-bitten energy but veering off into action-movie cuckoo land--the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average standard Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. Seagal plays an ex-Green Beret and CIA trouble-shooter turned Chicago cop taking on all manner of drug-related corruption.