Based on a Stephen King novel, The...

Based on a Stephen King novel, The Shining (KCOP Sunday at 8 p.m.) could have been a routine B-horror movie, but since this 1980 film turned out to be a 147-minute, $15-million Stanley Kubrick production, its scare tactics have been staged on a truly spectacular scale; this is at once its glory and its limitation, for the production values, as dazzling as they are, overwhelm the material. Jack Nicholson plays a writer eager to get away from it all and do some serious work.

A Hollywood reworking of Lina Wertmuller’s nifty 1975 “Swept Away

As a director, Danny De Vito, in the 1987 Throw Momma From the Train (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), is as explosive as he is an actor in this raucous, hilarious takeoff on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.” Starring with De Vito: Billy Crystal and the late Anne Ramsey as Momma.

The 1985 Death Wish 3 (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m.) found the Charles Bronson vigilante series running out of gas, but at least in the 1987 Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) director J. Lee Thompson turned a plot of stunning simple-mindedness into an efficient, fast-moving, hard-action, good-looking comic-book fantasy.

Although somewhat overpraised, Patrick Duncan’s 1989 84 Charlie MoPic (KCET, KPBS Wednesday at 10 p.m.) tries for an ultra-realistic illusion of the Vietnam War and attains a cutting edge, a hard-bitten damn-your-eyes integrity. To achieve this, Duncan turns his 1989 film into a fake documentary: a collection of apparently unedited (and uncensored) footage shot by a Mopic, or Army motion-picture cameraman (Byron Thomas), accompanying a six-man reconnaissance team into the Central Highlands in 1969. This footage is intended for the mundane purpose of serving as a training film for raw recruits, but the opportunistic Thomas goads the six men into self-revelations.

A hard genre movie with something different, the 1989 Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m., TBS Wednesday at 7:35 p.m.) is the strangest, most intense of the nine movies Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson have made together. On the one hand, we have a villain, an elegant, amoral pimp (Juan Fernandez) who hooks children on drugs; on the other, we have a hero, a police lieutenant (Bronson), who is pathologically protective of his teen-age daughter, brutalizes suspects mercilessly and explodes in racist tantrums.