Lionheart (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a...

Lionheart (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), a sub-Schwarzenegger 1991 thriller set in the illicit bare-knuckle fight game, has the grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many ‘90s action movies. Within 15 minutes we’re asked to believe that Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lyon, or Lionheart, has learned of his brother’s burning by wacko L.A. drug peddlers, gone berserk at a North African Foreign Legion Post, escaped from three jailers, stolen a Jeep and rammed it through a fence, escaped on foot across the desert, journeyed across the ocean as a stowaway stoker and then escaped again by diving into New York Harbor.

Casual Sex? (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.), directed by Genevieve Robert from a script by Judy Toll and Wendy Golman, proves you don’t have to be a man to make lewd, preposterous comedies. This 1988 movie is set mostly at a swinging bucolic health farm where good buddies (Lea Thompson, Victoria Jackson) journey in pursuit of aerobics and eros.

Paul Mazursky’s Scenes From a Mall (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.) has moments that are as good as any in his other L.A. films: the knockabout insights and oddball bits of business that keep you on your toes. A shopping mall can be a fantasyland for people who want to go around the world without every moving very far from the parking lot. The mall as L.A. microcosm is more than a great metaphor; it’s also the truth, or at least it’s the truth for the characters in this movie. What’s disappointing is that the film doesn’t live up to the high style of its premise. Starring Woody Allen and Bette Midler as a couple whose marriage breaks up during a shopping spree at the Beverly Center, the movie is geared up for grand-scale farce, but the pairing of Allen and Midler never takes flight. The film is far from terrible, but it doesn’t excite the senses, a failure no self-respecting L.A. movie can afford.

Desperate Hours (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a suburban nightmare out of the ‘50s, erupting in garish, elegant fury in the ‘90s. In Michael Cimino’s sleek but spotty 1990 version of Joseph Hayes’ famous melodrama, the plot is an Eisenhower-era nightmare: Three escaped convicts hide in a suburban middle-class home, holding the entire family hostage as they wait for help. The filmmakers fast-forward “Hours” into a world of adulterous high-tech cops and media-savvy criminals, but it’s still in limbo, trapped between eras. It’s a mix of A-Thriller and grand opera, full of crazy opulence and arias for both bad guy Mickey Rourke and beleaguered husband and father Anthony Hopkins.