`I'm Dangerous Tonight' Is Fine Lightheaded Entertainment

Tobe Hooper, the director responsible for such spine-tinglers as ``Poltergeist'' and ``Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' has fun with a story about a mysterious Aztec cloak that transforms the wearer into the personification of evil in ``I'm Dangerous Tonight,'' a new TV movie premiering on cable's USA Channel at 9 tonight (with repeats Sunday and Aug. 18).

We're not talking art here, we're talking fun - and while you've seen this plot before in various B-movie reincarnations, Hooper turns the script version by Bruce Lansbury and Philip John Taylor into a lively combination of thrills and laughter.

Maybe it's because the film stars Madchen Amick, who plays Shelly on ``Twin Peaks,'' but one would guess Hooper also watched ``Twin Peaks,'' because this quirky movie has a collection of oddball characters, whose idiosyncrasies rival those in the ABC series.

The film ostensibly stars Anthony Perkins - so right away you know there'll be plenty of psychos running loose - but he shares the spotlight with Mary Frann, Natalie Schafer, Corey Parker, R. Lee Ermey, Dee Wallace Stone - plus a lot of kooky cameos by lesser known performers.

The film begins with the delivery of a huge Aztec sacrificial altar, from which a professor extracts a ceremonial robe - and promptly goes nuts. But this is the robe that will not die - even though the body count it causes is staggering. These include Amick's sexy, selfish cousin, Gloria, played splendidly by Daisy Hall; Gloria's self-centered boyfriend/football hunk, played by Jason Brooks; a lady whose drug rehabilitation program isn't working (Stone), Amick's Grandma (Schaefer), Amick's high-handed aunt (Frann) and it almost does in Amick's boyfriend (Parker), as well as Amick. Ermey plays a kind of variation on Peter Falk's Columbo - and Perkins plays a professor who wants to get his hands on the robe for his own purposes.

It's all silly, a movie that keeps yelling ``Boo!'' - but Hooper keeps the pace clicking merrily along and the cast is so good that ``I'm Dangerous Tonight'' turns out to be a more than acceptable lightheaded entertainment for a hot summer night.

Heading south: Two differing looks at Cuba are on view tonight with a two-hour PBS special, ``Castro's Cuba: Two Views,'' airing at 9 tonight on KCTS-TV - which may be more Cuba than you're willing to sit through on a laid-back summer night. Both are partisan films, both seem quite opposite, yet both are probably more correct than Cubans might like to admit.

The first hour is a condensed version of Nestor Almendros' and Jorge Ulla's ``Nobody Listened,'' a film which chronicles a long list of human rights violations that have occurred in Cuba, beginning almost as soon as the Fidel Castro regime began. It's a depressing and scary report on life in Castro's prisons by political prisoners whose only mistakes were to voice the slightest negative opinion about the Castro revolution.

But Saul Landau's ``The Uncompromising Revolution,'' the second film, while stopping short of heaping praise upon Castro, does offer a number of examples of ways in which life for Cubans has improved: greater literacy, better health care, more rights for women, a bit more prosperity than in the days of the Batista dictatorship. If great personal freedom is not at the top of your priorities list, Cuba probably does seem a lot better under Castro. The situation is akin to pre-glasnost days in the Soviet Union, where life seemed somewhat better for many people than in the days of the czars.

Both films are so fervent in their points of view, which they keep reiterating, that eventually ``Castro's Cuba'' becomes repetitious. It all seems too much of a good thing. Scott Simon (of National Public Radio) is the host.

Video notes: Sheryl Lee Ralph and Phyllis Yvonne Stickney star in ``New Attitude,'' an ABC limited-run comedy series premiering at 9:30 tonight on KOMO-TV, unavailable for previewing. . . . CBS airs another unsold pilot, ``Mulberry Street,'' starring Connie Selleca, (who'll star in ABC's ``Baby Talk'' series this fall), at 8 tonight on KIRO-TV. . . . Clive James visits Paris on the episode of ``Postcards'' airing at 8 tonight on KCTS-TV. . . . KTPS-TV airs ``Camera Magic: Images of Nature,'' that fascinating British documentary about Oxford Scientific Films, which has provided much of the fantastic photography for series like ``Nova'' and ``Nature,'' at 8 tonight. . . . The pilot Fox airs tonight at 9:30 on KCPQ-TV is ``I'm Home,'' starring comedian Andrea Martin. . . . Cable's comedy channel, Ha!, has obtained the rights to old Jack Benny shows and will begin airing them this fall. . . .

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John Voorhees' column appears daily in The Times.