View From The Couch 

EATEN ALIVE (1976). Director Tobe Hooper's first picture following his 1974 horror masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a crushing disappointment, less reminiscent of his classic earlier film than of the senseless slasher flicks that would eventually flood the marketplace (Friday the 13th, the Halloween sequels, etc.). Released under a slew of different titles (among them Death Trap, Horror Hotel Massacre, Murder on the Bayou and Starlight Slaughter), this unrelenting study in brutality finds Neville Brand delivering a bug-eyed performance as Judd, a crazed hotel owner who regularly kills his guests (usually with his scythe) and feeds their remains to the crocodile that lurks in the swamp behind his inn. Texas Chain Saw heroine Marilyn Burns co-stars as a customer who's periodically tortured by Judd, The Addams Family's Carolyn Jones (looking inexplicably mummified at the age of 47) turns up as a bordello madam, and Robert Englund makes an early, pre-Freddy Krueger appearance as a sex-crazed redneck named Buck. Eaten Alive is repetitive nihilism with no sense of style and no trace of suspense, and the examination of rural America as Hell on Earth was far more pointed – and effective – in Texas Chain Saw.

Extras in the two-disc DVD set include audio commentary by various cast and crew members, interviews with Hooper, Englund and Burns, a piece on the real-life story that partly inspired the movie, and theatrical trailers. Best of all, though, are the reproductions of preview audience comment cards, with suggested titles for the film including Croc of Craziness, Swamp Jaws and Bored to Death – and one card reading, "If the title is changed, please let us know so we won't see it again."

Movie: *

Extras: ***

EVAN ALMIGHTY (2007). My parents may have been the ones to plunk down the dough to purchase the classic comedy album Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow... Right!, but as a child, I think I was the one most responsible for wearing out the vinyl via repeat listens to the famous "Noah" skits included on the record. If there's anything in Evan Almighty, the sort-of sequel to the 2003 Jim Carrey hit Bruce Almighty, that's even half as hilarious as Cosby's routine, I must have had my eyes closed in prayer and missed it. Playing the same part he essayed in Bruce Almighty, that of self-centered TV news anchor Evan Baxter, Steve Carell immediately finds himself neutered by director Tom Shadyac and his passel of writers, as his character has morphed into a typical movie dad who places his own career above the needs of his wife (Lauren Graham) and children. Having been elected to Congress on the platform that he'll "change the world," Evan now finds his hands full delivering on that promise when God (returning Morgan Freeman) appears and instructs him to build an ark. As his hair grows long and his clothing takes a decidedly Old Testament turn, he's deemed a loony by his neighbors and fellow Congressmen, even though all sorts of animals (rendered through hit-and-miss CGI effects) have paired off and wait patiently next to the big boat as it's being built. Asked mainly to pluck nose hairs and evade birds dropping "bombs," Carell is hampered by a script that instantly changes him from preening narcissist to a one-note saint. If I want to see a movie about a warm and cuddly guy with a white beard, I'll just pop Miracle on 34th Street into the DVD player instead.

DVD extras include deleted scenes and outtakes, short pieces on the creation of the movie's ark and the visual effects, an animal roundup game, and suggestions on how to be environmentally sound.

Movie: **

Extras: **1/2

SPIDER BABY OR, THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD (1964). It's easy to see why cultists have a soft spot for this ragged, low-budget effort from the 1960s. Also making the rounds under the more gruesome (and less accurate) monikers Attack of the Liver Eaters and Cannibal Orgy, this black-and-white curio – filmed in 1964 but largely released in 1968 due to monetary and distribution woes – possesses a quirky sense of humor as it relates the story of the Merrye family, two sisters (Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn) and one brother (Sid Haig, later Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects) who all suffer from a peculiar form of mental illness. Only Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), the family chauffeur, can keep them in line, but when distant relatives arrive at their dilapidated mansion with the intent of collecting an inheritance, even he can't stop the siblings' murderous antics. Chaney's career had long since disintegrated at this late stage (he would pass away in 1973), but here he delivers a fine performance in a sympathetic role. As an added bonus, he even warbles the opening theme song, with lyrics like "Cannibal spiders creep and crawl/ Boys and ghouls having a ball/ Frankenstein, Dracula and even the Mummy/ Are sure to end up in someone's tummy." Lennon-McCartney it ain't, but it sets the proper schizophrenic tone for this one-of-a-kind oddity.

DVD extras include audio commentary by Haig and director Jack Hill, a making-of piece, a featurette on film scorer Ronald Stein, and an extended sequence.

Movie: **1/2

Extras: ***

SURF'S UP (2007). The world needed another penguin movie about as much as it needed another Rambo flick. Turns out we're getting both, but while it's too early to comment on the upcoming Stallone sequel, the animated film about the flightless fowl isn't bad, with a narrative slant that overcomes its typically blasé story about an underdog who triumphs against the odds while learning important life lessons regarding friendship, sacrifice and self-awareness. Employing a mock-documentary format rarely seen in animated films – only Aardman's Oscar-winning Creature Comforts comes to mind – this pleasant time filler plays like Dogtown and Z-Boys or The Endless Summer for the small fry, with its tale of a slacker penguin named Cody (Shia LaBeouf) who's only happy when he's surfing. He enters into a major international competition, where his rivals include new pal Chicken Joe (Jon Heder) and the bullying (and nine-time defending champion) Tank Evans (Diedrich Bader). An underachiever from the start, Cody eventually finds romance with a cute lifeguard named Lani (Zooey Deschanel, sexy even when voicing a penguin) and a mentor in The Geek (Jeff Bridges, slyly channeling The Dude from The Big Lebowski), a beach bum harboring a big secret. The abundance of schmaltz that plagued Happy Feet is thankfully missing here, though the movie does make sure to shoehorn in the obligatory flatulence gags.

DVD extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurettes, three interactive games, the Oscar-winning animated short The ChubbChubbs! and the new follow-up The ChubbChubbs Save Xmas, and the music video for Lauryn Hill's "Lose Myself."

Movie: **1/2

Extras: ***1/2

TROY (2004). Trust Hollywood to further fictionalize a story that has long been regarded as one of the greatest works of fiction ever created. Troy may be all about Achilles and Hector and Helen and that infernal heel, yet there's a reason a screen credit states that the movie was "inspired by" Homer's The Iliad rather than the more common "based on" tag. Yet only the anal-retentives among us objected to this celluloid treatment of a story that should be familiar to anyone who ever regularly attended their high school English classes. Troy, a so-so theatrical performer stateside but a gargantuan smash around the rest of the globe, is a big, brawny movie that scores on a handful of levels: as a rousing epic that puts its budget where its mouth is; as a thoughtful tale in which men struggle with issues involving honor, loyalty and bravery; and as a topical treatise on what happens when soldiers blindly follow their leaders into war. Director Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm) never allows the epic to overwhelm the intimate: The battle sequences are staggering to behold, but the talky sequences are equally memorable. As Trojan hero Hector, Eric Bana delivers the best performance, followed by Peter O'Toole as his wise father, King Priam. By comparison, Brad Pitt is never wholly convincing in this ancient setting, but he exhibits enough charisma and resolve to make a passable Achilles. Most of the other key roles (played by Orlando Bloom, Brian Cox and Sean Bean, among others) are well cast, with only German model Diane Kruger failing to hold up her end – her Helen is a boring beauty, hardly indicative of the face that launched a thousand ships.

Troy had already been released three years ago in a lavish, two-disc DVD set, so the selling point here is that this is being billed as the "Director's Cut," with 34 extra minutes of previously unseen material (bringing the film's total running time to 196 minutes). In addition to carrying over three making-of features from the previous DVD (but, alas, not the groovy 3-D animated guide to the Greek gods), this also includes an introduction by Petersen as well as several more pieces further breaking down the film's production, resulting in approximately 80 minutes of behind-the-scenes material.

Movie: ***1/2

Extras: ***1/2

YOU KILL ME (2007). Perhaps not since Jack Nicholson in 1985's Prizzi's Honor has any actor so solidly struck the funny bone portraying a hit man as Ben Kingsley does in You Kill Me. The film's premise initially makes it sound like a cutesy variation on the type of pseudo-hip crime flick churned out on a monthly basis by Tarantino wannabes: Mob assassin Frank Falenczyk (Kingsley) was once at the top of his game, but in recent times he's fallen so deeply under the spell of the bottle that he now drunkenly sleeps through his assignments. His boss (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to sober up; there, he lands a job at a funeral home, attends AA meetings under the tutelage of a gay sponsor (Luke Wilson), and strikes up an offbeat relationship with a sharp-tongued woman (Tea Leoni) who doesn't seem particularly disturbed by his line of work. You Kill Me feels like a lightweight throwaway, but it remains in the memory longer than expected, thanks to the freewheeling direction by John Dahl (The Last Seduction), a killer-quip-packed script by the team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and a sterling cast fronted by a perfectly cast Kingsley, who manages to elicit chuckles with just his terse facial expressions.

DVD extras include audio commentary by Dahl, Markus and McFeely, a behind-the-scenes short, and a visual effects demonstration.

Movie: ***

Extras: **