In an age when big action movie...

In an age when big action movie spectaculars like “Rambo” or “Predator” begin to resemble video games, is it surprising that the most popular Nintendo game of all, The Super Mario Bros., gets turned into a movie? Or that the film (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.) that results is mostly flash, carnage and visual explosions, with characters as light as their blip-on-the-screen inspirations? In Super Mario Bros., Nintendo heroes Luigi and Mario are metamorphosed into a pair of Brooklyn Italian-American plumbers (played by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo), accidentally dropped into an alternate dimension of dinosaur-people. If you had to grade it purely on its visual coups--the effects, Dean Semler’s cinematography, the sheer density and bravura of the production design--you’d have to give Mario Bros. high marks. Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel co-direct.

There’s none of that through-white-eyes stuff in TNT’s very gory, but very interesting and intelligent Geronimo (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.). Written by J.T. Allen and directed by Roger Young, it’s told solely from the perspective of the Apache leader himself, known as Goyahkla before earning fame as a great warrior among this Southwestern people who were split into bands that had tenaciously battled Spaniards for centuries.

After waging war on Norman Rockwell--Frank Capra small--town America in the first “Gremlins,” in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.) the grinning, green little beasties take on New York City, running riot through Manhattan’s Clamp Center and all the ferocious cartoon satire director Joe Dante and writer Charlie Haas can pump up. The movie seems constricted--it never strays too far into the Manhattan streets--and the conversion of John Glover’s Daniel Clamp from bad to good seems a little trumped up.