DVD Corner

“The Bill Cosby Show: Season One”: After “I Spy,” before the Huxtables – and with Cosby nearing his prime. Here, in “The Bill Cosby Show,” which lasted only two seasons on NBC before the network pulled it, Cosby was Chet Kincaid, a Los Angeles-based high school teacher and basketball coach teaching his students plenty about life – and learning just as much in return. The show is just what you expect from Cosby – it smooths out life’s roughest edges, fixes its problems, and packages it neatly with a message. So, Cosby’s charm is key. Grade: B

“Everybody Loves Raymond: Season 7”: Everybody? Not quite. This seventh season of the popular show features the episode “Somebody Hates Raymond,” which is a highlight, as are the episodes “The Disciplinarian” and “The Annoying Kid,” the latter of which find Ray and Debra befriending a new couple with a caveat – their 8-year-old son is the brat of all brats. Includes audio commentaries, deleted scenes and bloopers, but really, it’s all about Ray Romano, Patricia Heaton, Peter Boyle, Doris Roberts and Brad Garrett, who once again shine amid the heated comedy. Grade: A-

“Gilmore Girls: Season 6”: With names like Sookie St. James, Luke Danes, and Logan Huntzberger, you expect “The Gilmore Girls” to be soapier than it is. But with its core relationship focused on the lives of single-mother Lorelai Gilmore and her recently estranged daughter, Rory, the storylines are steeped less in camp than in the show’s privileged idea of reality. Quirky New England characters and old money round out the landscape, which is occasionally too precious for its own good. Still, this mildly amusing, well-acted series is wise enough not to hit us too hard over the heads about how difficult it can be to grow up, whether you’re a child or an adult. Grade: B+

“House of Wax: HD DVD”: Fresh off her DUI bust comes the high-definition debut of Paris Hilton’s professional acting career. It might make you squint. A broad update of the 1953 version starring Vincent Price, the film features your typical screen twentysomethings (beautiful, obnoxious, deserving of everything that fells them) trying to outrun a couple of madmen on the loose. It’s a bloody, messy little throwback to such classics as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” unintentionally brushing against fetish since it eventually dips so many of its hotties in hot wax. Whatever. When a horror movie fails to induce fear or even a few beneficial jolts, as this movie does, the effect is grim. Rated R. Grade: D

“The Secrets of Mary Magdalene”: On the coattails of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” which questioned whether Mary Magdalene was Jesus Christ’s wife, comes Dan Burstein’s documentary “The Secrets of Mary Magdalene,” which also wonders whether she was just a common prostitute. The reenactments depicting “history’s most misunderstood woman” are a bit much, as you would expect from a film that refers to Magdalene as “the bad girl of the Bible,” but the scholarly debate at the core of this otherwise good two-disc set does open the issue to broader discussion. Grade: B-

“Stay Alive”: The premise is the pits. Here, Elizabeth Bathory, the real-life 17th-century vamp who slaughtered 600 young virgins and bathed in their blood in an attempt to keep herself young (didn’t work), has been resurrected in a video game called “Stay Alive,” which is about to go into commercial release. Before it does, though, it must be tested by a handful of beta testers, who get knocked off in exactly the same way their characters die in the game. Bummer! What ensues is death by video game – and a fine example of how rock-bottom bad the horror genre has become. Rated PG-13. Grade: D-

“S.W.A.T.-Blu-ray”: Features shortcomings that generally sideline a film – heavy-handed product placements, lapses in logic, clumsy dialogue, a cliched opening, an uneven tone. And yet “S.W.A.T.” swats back with a solid cast and well-done, over-the-top action scenes that involve planes, trains and automobiles – and the inevitable destruction of each. Colin Farrell, Samuel L. Jackson, Olivier Martinez, LL Cool J and Michelle Rodriguez all trump the weak material, with audiences left with an above-average movie that wins you over even though some moments occasionally let you down. Rated: PG-13. Grade: B-

“Troy: HD DVD”: One of the most ambivalent war movies Hollywood ever has produced, with the viewer not always clear for whom to root. The result is a great looking yet curiously passionless movie that lacks personality and heart. Worse is the dialogue, which is stiff and sometimes silly, especially when spoken by Brad Pitt, whose self-conscious performance as Achilles sends the film down the Aegean and clogs it in hair products – his Achilles looks like Fabio by way of Goldilocks. It’s Australian-born Eric Bana who rises from the film’s blood, severed limbs and ashes to deliver a performance that’s so confident, it galvanizes an otherwise lightweight movie undeserving of its 2.5 hour running time. Rated R. Grade: C-

“Traffic: HD DVD”: A movie about the ongoing drug wars that seamlessly interweaves three loosely related stories. Director Steven Soderbergh captures a frenetic, unpredictable world fraught with violence, betrayal, addiction, great wealth, greater despair, and, underscoring it all, the ongoing highs and lows of a society corrupted by drugs. What’s new about that? Plenty. The film’s triumph isn’t just in its brutal depiction of a society we think we’ve seen, but in how the director resists the temptation to moralize. The movie isn’t cynical or, for that matter, even hopeful. Instead, Soderbergh understands the power of observation, and so he’s content to just observe. Rated R. Grade: A