If you’re looking to score with the ladies this week, take it from us: bitches love funerals.

P.S., I Love You: Tearjerking chick flick where Hilary Swank’s husband dies of a brain tumor, then gives her a life-makeover from beyond the grave.

Over Her Dead Body: Light hearted romcom about a bride who gets impaled by an ice sculpture on her wedding day, and then haunts her fiance’s new girlfriend.

Hottie and the Nottie: Movie starring a woman who makes people want to kill themselves.

Teeth: Two words: Killer Vagina.

Also on DVD this week: Bella, the Business of Being Born, First Sunday, I’m Not There, and Steel City.

John Waters fans, prepare to be happy. No, unfortunately Mondo Trasho isn’t coming out on special edition DVD, but his morbid tale of suburban butchery, Serial Mom, has finally arrived in an impressive package that makes HBO Home Video’s previous release of the film look positively anemic by comparison. Go ahead and use that old fullscreen disc as a coaster, because this is the version of Serial Mom that every Waters fan is going to want for their collection.

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27 Dresses: Grab your bon bons, invite your best girlfriend, and fire up the DVD player.

Diving Bell and the Butterfly: Find your direct neural interface, use it to call your favorite quadriplegic, and settle in for the night.

The Golden Compass: Fire up your atheistic commentary on the societal pressures against discovering one’s true identity, mount your armor plated polar bear, and cuddle up on the couch.

How She Move: Arbitrarily disregard your English syntax, talk like a lolcat, and bust a move.

Also on DVD this week: King Corn, Nanking, and Moondance Alexander.

Dark Sky Films has just released a new edition of Jim VanBebber’s violent cult classic Deadbeat at Dawn as part of their truly impressive four disc “Visions of Hell” DVD box-set (which also includes the unrated, two-disc special edition of VanBebber’s transgressive shocker The Manson Family), but those who still own the original Synapse release of Deadbeat at Dawn may not want to toss that old disc up on eBay just yet!

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Cloverfield: Blockbuster about a giant monster that a hype-tastic marketing campaign kept in secret and shadow. Spoiler: It’s not a lion.

One Missed Call: J-Horror remake in which you get a phone call from your future, dying self. Then you die. Spoiler: Ed Burns‘ career got this call before cell phones were even invented.

Charlie Wilson’s War: Movie about senator Charlie Wilson’s crusade in the 1980’s to fund the Mujahideen’s war against the Soviet government in Afghanistan. Spoiler: Things in Afghanistan are still pretty bad.

What Would Jesus Buy: Documentary about marketing and commercialization in American culture. Spoiler: It turns out what Jesus would buy is this.

Also on DVD this week: the Savages, the Orphanage, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, Romulus, My Father, Starting Out in the Evening, Trailer Park Boys: The Movie, and the Walker.

Anyone raised when the VCR became a common household item and VHS was still king is sure to remember those long walks down the seemingly endless aisles of the local mom and pop video store – those clunky, oversized plastic treasures beckoning to be rented, taken home, and enjoyed in the comfort of one’s own living room. The striking artwork on a number of those clamshell cases was so luridly vivid that it seemed to dare the indecisive movie lover to pass it by, such was the case with the cover of Don Jones killer-in-the-woods frightener The Forest – the image of two crazed eyes peering wildly from behind prickly branches and hand firmly clutching hunting knife hinting at horrors that might make the average viewer give up camping for the foreseeable future.

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Something must have been lost in the translation with this fantasy-tinged Tunisian effort from 1984, issued on video for the first time by Typecast Releasing – which hit video store shelves on March 25th. The barely intelligible premise has to do with an instructor (writer-director-star Nacer Khemir) who arrives at an eccentric community in the middle of the desert. His mission involves teaching the students of a crumbling, decrepit old town populated by a nearly indistinguishable cast of Arabic characters. Unfortunately, that’s about as exciting and as lucid as this opus gets. The bottom line: Wanderers of the Desert is the kind of foreign film that gives foreign films a bad name.

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Leave it to the French to usher in the next great wave of horror cinema. As youth riots once again send bourgeois suburbanites running for the safety of their middle-class compounds, the prevailing culture of fear and uncertainty has proven the flashpoint for some of the most genuinely frightening shockers of the new millennium. Now, on the heels of such relentlessly tense new-classics as Calvaire, Haute Tension, and Them comes a grisly home invasion flick that offers a pitch-perfect balance of grinding tension and inventive gore. Newcomers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury may not have enough credits to distinguish themselves as masters of the genre just yet, but as Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur before them, they’re certainly on the right track.

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