For better and worse, the 1992 Batman...

For better and worse, the 1992 Batman Returns (KNBC Sunday at 9 p.m.) is clearly the product of director Tim Burton’s morose imagination. His dark, melancholy vision is undeniably something to see, but here its effect is oppressive rather than exhilarating. With the notable exception of Michelle Pfeiffer’s splendid work as Catwoman, it strangles almost all of the enjoyment out of this movie without half trying. This time out the plot concerns the story of The Penguin (Danny De Vito) teaming up the crazed Max Schreck (Christopher Walken).

Desperate Hours (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), the 1990 version of Joseph Hayes’ archetypal melodrama about escaped convicts holding a suburban family hostage, actually improves somewhat on the 1955 Wyler-Bogart-Fredric March film, but falls apart at the end. Director Michael Cimino and cinematographer Doug Milsome keep the screen ina deep-focus blaze of color; snarling Mickey Rourke and slow-burning Anthony Hopkins rip out the psychological and class tensions.

Weekend at Bernie’s II (Fox Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is an inept and incoherent 1993 sequel to the summer of ’89 sleeper comedy involving a wandering corpse (Terry Kiser) and a pair of ambitious but feckless yuppies (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman).

The Famine Within (KCET Friday at 10 p.m.), Katherine Gilday’s 1990 documentary about women and food--a subject already covered in “Eating”--examines the obsession from a broader perspective: socio-cultural, psychological, radical-political. Through interviews with experts, counselors, over-eaters, anorexics, bulimics, models and children, we get a portrait of a culture out of control: full of people who want to eat like pigs and look like gazelles.

The kids in the 1993 The Sandlot (KABC Saturday at 8 p.m.) are so fresh-scrubbed and perky that they might as well be plugging something in a commercial--fabric softener, say, or peanut butter. This is one of those kids’ films that takes everything to do with childhood and turns it into high concept. It’s about what happens to the new kid on the block, Scotty (Tom Guiry), when he joins the neighborhood’s eight-man sandlot team during the summer of ’62.