A double bill of TV movie trash
It’s a funny thing but TV trash is often most enjoyable when it isn’t pretending to be anything but trash. You know without even glancing past the title 2- Headed Shark Attack that this is going to be a heckuva way to spend a fun Saturday night. And when you see that the cast includes Charlie O’Connell, Brooke Hogan and the magnificent Carmen Electra, you know you’re going to get two hours of solid, satisfying entertainment that revels in its badness.
The plot revolves around a group of hapless college students aboard a Semester at Sea ship which runs over a dead shark, fouling the propellers and causing it to take on water. No sooner are they radioing for help than a two- headed shark bites off the ship’s radio antenna. Oh, dear.
2- Headed Shark Attack is being paired with the equally engaging Malibu Shark Attack, David Lister’s 2009 sci- fi classic about nature getting even with surf- happy Malibu beach bums. Pass the munchies. ( Space — 6 p. m.)
Tony Shalhoub: keeping busy
Did the main actors in Monk continue TV or movie careers? Charlie Eldred Title star Tony Shalhoub, who won three Emmy Awards for the series, has since been in the movies How Do You Know and ( in voice only) Cars 2, and also in the HBO dramas Too Big to Fail and Hemingway and Gellhorn. And he may return to series work before long, since he’s making a sitcom pilot for CBS. Ted Levine, alias Captain Stottlemeyer, had a regular role in HBO’s short- lived horse racing drama Luck, and he appeared in the pilot for AMC’s Hell on Wheels. Traylor Howard ( a. k. a. Natalie) hasn’t done any major projects since Monk; Jason Gray- Stanford ( Lieutenant Disher) has had guest shots on NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy. Stanley Kamel, who played Dr. Charles Kroger, died in 2008 before Monk finished its run. This has bothered me for 40 years or so. I thought I remembered seeing a movie about a group of men stranded in the desert with a downed plane, but it wasn’t The Flight of the Phoenix. Do you know of such a movie? Cheryl Staats Two movies spring to mind, the first being Sands of the Kalahari, a 1965 drama that also included a woman — Susannah York — among the passengers trapped in the African desert. Stuart Whitman and Stanley Baker were among that film’s stars. Then, there was a made- for- CBS 1970 movie titled Sole Survivor, in which a long- missing plane was found in the Libyan desert, with the lone survivor supposedly helping military officials determine what happened. Vince Edwards, Richard Basehart and William Shatner were in that cast.
Martin Clunes: sixth season
Do you know whether either Doc Martin or William and Mary will return to TV in the future? Both are top of the range of quality TV. R. Damelin Vision Television is rebroadcasting Season 5 of Doc Martin as part of the channel’s Wednesday prime- time lineup. Series star Martin Clunes announced a few months ago that a sixth season would go into production next spring and air in the U. K. in the fall of 2013, but no Canadian date has been announced. As for William and Mary, that series ended production way back in 2005.