There are misfires but also some funny...

There are misfires but also some funny stuff and a refreshing taste of self-mockery in Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I m Gonna Git You Sucka (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a 1988 satire of the early ‘70s blaxploitation action movies, with their natty, super-masculine heroes, flamboyant pimps and drug czars.

In the 1985 Runaway Train (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.), through a wilderness of snow and ice blasts a brakeless train, roaring ahead out of control, on which two escaped convicts and a frightened employee enact a timeless dance of death and freedom. With Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca DeMornay and John Ryan.

The 1982 The Border (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.), absorbingly directed by Tony Richardson, is the most unjustly neglected picture in the career of Jack Nicholson. It takes a compassionate look at the plight of illegal aliens along the U.S. Mexican border, and Nicholson plays a border patrolman increasingly disaffected with his job of forcing Mexicans back to their side of the Rio Grande.

In the 1986 The Mission (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.) Robert Bolt’s screenplay--about a genocidal attack against Indian settlers and their missionary protectors, by a colonial government that wants to turn the land over to profiteers--keeps reaching for tragic grandeur and just misses. A major problem: the Indians are never characterized, and the whole drama rages instead among good and bad colonists. Directed by Roland Joffe; with Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons.

Altered States (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a primal-scream, 1980 anthropological werewolf movie, based on Paddy Chayefsky’s novel and directed by Ken Russell. (Chayefsky scripted but disowned the project.) If that seems an odd combination, the movie is odder still--full of the patented Russell pyrotechnics, rapid-fire dialogue and bewilderingly Byzantine twists. But it’s fun. With William Hurt, in his first film, and Blair Brown.