Movie Spotlight

It is downright scary to realize that Ernest Rides Again (KABC Sunday at 7 p.m.) was already the fifth in a series of comedies starring Jim Varney as Ernest P. (Powertools) Worrell, that zany weirdo that Varney created as a TV pitchman back in 1980. The humor in this film is so elementary, so numskull, it defies description or extended discussion. Since in his own mind Ernest, now a janitor at a small-town college, is more than a match for Indiana Jones, it is not surprising that he buys the theory of the college’s history professor (Ron James) that the actual Crown Jewels of England are not in the Tower of London after all but are buried somewhere in the vicinity inside a giant Revolutionary War cannon.

In the 1990 Men at Work (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.), a pleasant, knockabout 1990 comedy, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen (real-life brothers) play a couple of South Bay garbage collectors who come upon the corpse of a city council candidate who was about to become a whistle-blower on a toxic-waste operation run by a tycoon.

With its convoluted structure, soft jazz score and wistfully confessional air, the 1988 Stealing Home (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.) might pass for a personal Hollywood film. It’s a weird, glossed-up hybrid, soggy with nostalgia, and it treats the identity crisis of a failed minor league baseball player (Mark Harmon) as if he were a suffering artist, struggling in a world that had no place for baseball. In flashbacks Jodie Foster plays his first love.

In his six decades as a force against evil, a certain high-profile crime fighter has survived confrontations with the Red Blot and the Gray Fist, the Condor and the Cobra, the Vindicator, the Voodoo Master and the Silent Seven. After all that, surviving The Shadow (KNBC Sunday at 9 p.m.), the 1994 film that carries his name, shouldn’t be too difficult. Actually, there are times when this action-adventure starring Alec Baldwin as the man with the all-knowing laugh seems on its way to not only surviving but also prospering. Set largely in a mythical, dreamlike New York, it has the benefit of a gorgeous production design and eye-catching visual effects. But if ever a film made you wince whenever its actors opened their mouths, “The Shadow” is it.

Sophie’s Choice (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) is Alan Pakula’s impreesive 1982 adaptation of William Styron’s fervent tale of Brooklyn in the ‘40s, youthful literarys aspiration, love, madness and the scars of the Holocaust. In some ways, more effective on screen than on the page; in any case, a model movie tearjerker, with Meryl Streep as Sophie, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol and narrator Josef Sommer.