Heat Wave, TNT's movie about the 1965 Watts Riots is a far better film than Riot and handles many similar themes far more successfully. Riot, on the hand does a lot of yakking but little is really talked about. In trying to say "everything" about the causes and concerns that lead to the L.A. Riots, it ends up becoming totally unfocused and rather tedious. This is too important a subject to be given such short shrift and lack of real insight.

This film tries its hardest to deal with the LA Riots from all sides. it

kind of fails a bit but mostly it's a great film. It's got Melvin Van

Peebles in it, what mroe do you want? A proper late night TV film that I have now seen 3 times just by

chance. Mario Van P is his usual SUPERHAM self and Luke Perry

puts in a good performance as a "cop/Vanilla Ice from Cool as Ice

lookalike" and it's all good fun in a hard hitting issues based film

kind of way. I like the way they incorporated news footage. That works.

The latino quarter of the film is the weakest cos the main kid sucks

the proverbials in a major way.

Watch it, it's good.