Rialto Channel Goes to Hell

Sky’s Rialto Channel will celebrate Halloween with a Saturday night season of highbrow horror in October.

Four of the movies will be NZ TV premieres and the fifth will be new to the channel.

The season will open on October 3 with The Hole in the Ground, about a youngster in rural Ireland who returns home not quite the same after falling into a sinkhole, and close on October 31 with the Nicholas Cage sensation, Color Out of Space, an adaptation of the HP Lovecraft tale about a farmer battling a mutant extraterrestrial organism after a meteorite lands in his front yard.

Daniel Isn’t Real (October 10) stars Miles Robbins as a troubled college student who resurrects his imaginary childhood friend (Patrick Schwarzenegger) to help realise this dreams – only for Daniel to try to take over this mind and soul.

I See You (October 17) stars Helen Hunt as the unstable wife of a womanising detective whose household is upended by a malicious presence while he’s investigating a 12-year-old’s mysterious disappearance.

Swallow (October 24) stars Haley Bennett as a happily, newly-pregnant housewife whose seemingly perfect life starts to unravel as dark secrets surface from her past and she develops a dangerous condition that causes her to swallow inedible objects.

Next month Rialto will also premiere a season of British movies on Sunday nights (Mammal, Couple in a Hole, Michael Inside, All at Sea) and a From Russia to Ukraine season on Mondays (The Humorist, Acid, Iron Fury, Donbass).

French spy thriller series The Bureau will conclude its season five run on October 27 and a documentary strand about extraordinary people will screen Wednesday nights (The Big Little Farm, Armstrong, On Her Shoulders, For Sama).

An Exposing the Truth season on Thursday nights will combine true crime and political subjects.

People You Know (October 1) explores the political alliance between religious fundamentalists, oligarchs, Cambridge Analytica and its shell companies that have fundamentally shifted the balance of politics in the US.

Between Black and Blue (October 8 and 15) is billed as “an unbelievable story involving crooked cops, a mafia Godfather, murder, an alleged public poisoning, Elvis Presley, prison gang leaders and a cocaine-addicted newspaper editor who printed it all”.

The Dakota Entrapment Tapes (October 22) uncovers the truth behind a 20-year-old’s mysterious death in small-town North Dakota where he had been coerced into becoming an informant for an aggressive police task force.

On the Record (October 29) documents how former music executive Drew Dixon went public with allegations that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons raped and sexually harassed her while she was working at his label, Def Jam records.

But arguably the month’s biggest highlight is the S4 premiere of outstanding Canadian detective drama Cardinal, which will air 8.30 Fridays from October 1. Reads the blurb for the final season:

What starts as a missing persons case soon turns into something much bigger – a series of gruesome murders where victims are left to freeze to death in the snow. Cardinal and Delorme are up against an old adversary fuelled by revenge over past tragedies, but in chasing the murderer, they must confront their own pasts. Cardinal is struggling to move on after the shocking loss of his wife Catherine, while Delorme is torn between the life she’s built in Algonquin Bay, and her career ambitions. Booted from the homicide squad over his obsession with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl, Cardinal is reassigned to the case with a new partner, after the girl’s body is found. But Delorme has a hidden agenda, she has orders to investigate Cardinal, who is suspected of links to a drug dealer.