Best of DSTV Movies: Top Movies

Just because a film is sitting pretty in the important M-Net Sunday night blockbuster slot doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a hit.

Safe Haven M-Net, Channel 101, Today, 20:05

Just because a film is sitting pretty in the important M-Net Sunday night blockbuster slot doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a hit. This is one of those where you're going to have to make up your own mind.

Safe Haven, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks, is a romantic thriller that was paddled by most critics, but the viewer reviews and opinion polls on the usual film-focused websites seem to indicate they liked it enough.

It opens with a scene of a woman with a bloody knife disguising herself and hopping onto a bus bound for the type of quiet, podunk town people on the 1am always head for in movies. She introduces herself to her new employers and neighbours as Katie (Julianne Hough).

Although reluctant, she eventually befriends her neighbour Jo (Cobie Smulders) and falls for the widowed convenience store owner, Alex (Josh Duhamel). She gradually wins over his two kids (Mimi Kirkland and Noah Lomax) too - but the bad thing she apparently did at the start of the film is inevitably going to catch up with her.

From there, it's the usual "love conquers all" narrative we're all familiar with. This isn't a bad way for a film to go, if done right. What might have gotten up the noses of some critics is the apparently non-sequitur big twist. There are some clues leading up to it, sure, but why it even needed to be in there is the big question.

Cherry 2000 MGM Channel, Channel 140, Today, 22:00

This sci-fi action film from 1988 was just too deliciously weird not to mention. First off, it's another one of those pre-'90s, Soylent Green-esque movies that offers up some grim portents of a future that is now only a few years away and nowhere near as bleak and hopeless as the writers envisioned. The second is, well... it's all about an executive's quest to find a replacement for his limited-edition sex robot.

Yes, that's what it's about. In the post-apocalyptic year 2017, the US is a resource-deficient wasteland populated by small bastions of civilisation. Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) short circuits his sex robot, the limited-edition Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley), and is told that the model went out of production years ago. Yes, sex robots that are indistinguishable from humans are old news in 2017. The only place he can get a replacement is the old factory, located in the sand-buried ruins of Vegas.

He must have been really attached to Cherry, because he hires E (Melanie Griffith, pictured), a mercenary guide, to take him to the factory, while trying to avoid the attentions of the crazy warlord Lester (Tim Thomerson).

It's borderline goofy, but it's also weirdly fascinating for the view of our times it presents.