La Bamba (KCOP Sunday at 6 p.m.)...

La Bamba (KCOP Sunday at 6 p.m.) was a real 1987 surprise: a portrait of late rocker Ritchie Valens by director Luis Valdez, that had heart, drama, excellent performances (by Lou Diamond Phillips as Valens and Esai Morales as his tormented brother) and a red-hot Los Lobos soundtrack.

In some ways the quintessential yuppie film noir, Lawrence Kasdan’s clever, cold, slick and tricky 1981 Body Heat (KCOP Sunday at 8 p.m.) was a “Double Indemnity” for the ‘80’s. Full of glossy surfaces and multiple plot twists, it gave us Florida lawyer William Hurt, seduced by sultry Kathleen Turner into a murder plot that also involved shabby, shady Mickey Rourke.

If you’ve seen one ‘80s Arnold Schwarzennegger thriller, you’ve practically seen them all. In the 1986 Raw Deal (KCOP Monday at 8 p.m.), directed by John Irvin, he battles gangsters in the U.S. suites and streets, and in the 1987 Predator (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.), flashily shot by John McTiernan, he battles monsters in the South American jungles. But it all seems the same: Arnold glowers, Arnold wisecracks, everything explodes and hundreds die.

The fantastically popular 1986 Top Gun (KCOP Tuesday at 8 p.m.) from director Tony Scott and producers Simpson-Bruckheimer brought something new to American movies: Disco war. Rock ‘n roll blared while naval aviation flying studs--Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards--boogied in the bars and blasted in the skies. Somehow, the public bought it.

Manhunter (KCOP Thursday at 8 p.m.), which Michael Mann adapted from Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon” and turned into the ultimate display of his rock ‘n’ glitz “Miami Vice” style, offers an earlier incarnation of everyone’s favorite cannibal, Hannibal Lecter--this time played by Brian Cox.

The Untouchables (CBS Thursday at 8:30 p.m.) has such top-chop personnel--director Brian De Palma, writer David Mamet, actors Kevin Costner, Robert DeNiro, Sean Connery and Andy Garcia--that it makes the old Eliot Ness vs. Al Capone crime-story seem shiny-new.

Steven Spielberg changed the face of American movies with Jaws (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.), the 1975 Peter Benchley-derived super-thriller about an unstoppable killer shark, terrorizing a New England seashore community and deftly eluding the trio of cop Roy Scheider, boatsman Robert Shaw and scientist Richard Dreyfuss. Spielberg tried to change the movies in a different way with 1985’s The Color Purple (CBS Saturday at 8 p.m.), an exciting if overblown adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel of poor, rural Afro-American life; it introduced most of us to Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey.