Get Smart Season 4
Maxwell Smart finally gets the girl in this 4 disc collection of the fourth season of the 1960s TV show. Agent 99, you could've done so much better.

Red Dwarf: Back To Earth - The Director's Cut
The surprisingly not-terrible reunion of the late 80s, early 90s comedy comes to America in the "As it's meant to be seen" format fans would rather watch. Expect behind the scenes footage and the traditional Smeg-Ups to round out the package.

Oct 13
Land of The Lost
Will Ferrells's not-especially-well-received remake of the classic TV series may not have made much of a dent in the box office earlier this year, but somehow we wouldn't be too surprised if it found a (potentially stoned) enthusiastic audience awaiting it on DVD.

Oct 20
Blood: The Last Vampire
Swordplay! Vampires! Violence! They're all coming to your house, as Chris Nahon's take on the Japanese anime gets released on DVD and Blu Ray.

Drag Me To Hell
Sam Raimi's return to off-kilter horror promises to be even more fun on DVD; it's a re-edited "unrated" version.

Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen
Michael Bay's ridiculously successful Robots In Disguise sequel gets multiple editions as it transforms into something you can take home: There's a single disc DVD, double disc DVD and double disc Blu Ray. We'd recommend the latter, if possible, for that authentic HD overwhelming robot carnage effect.

Oct 27
Adult Swim: In A Box
A truly bizarre seven disc set, collecting Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume Two, Space Ghost Coast To Coast: Season Three, Moral Orel: Season One, Robot Chicken: Season Two, Metalocalypse: Season One, Sealab 2021: Season Two, and the pilot episodes for The Best Of Totally For Teens, Cheyenne Cinnamon, Korgoth Of Barbaria, Perfect Hair Forever and Evan Dorkin's awesome Welcome To Eltingville, none of which made it to series. Don't ask. Just buy it.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan
Edward James Olmos' after-the-fact TV movie promises to fill in some of the gaps in just what the cylons' plan actually was, and this DVD version promises footage that won't be shown on Syfy when it airs November. So that's even more gaps filled in, I guess?

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

Like any decent horror movie, Drag Me To Hell had a not-so-subtle subtext about the kind of people who deserve to have demons barf up cats on them. In this case, it's a bank loan officer who comes from humble origins but aspires to join the upper middle class. To prove herself deserving of a promotion, she denies a poor all old woman an extension on her mortgage payment. Wrong move: the old woman calls down the wrath of an ancient demon on her. And the moral of the story is about as red as it gets. When the rich screw the poor out of their property, the poor will rise up (even from beyond the grave) and smash them.

Here are 15 other movies with ruddy moral centers for you to chew on as the banks suck you dry and your company gets downsized for the third time this year.

Tales From The Hood
Plot: Three gang bangers from the hood try to rob a funeral home, and discover the undertaker is all lot more than they bargained for. He tells them the stories behind four people whose dead bodies are in his parlors, all of which are scary fables.
The moral: The oppressed will always rise up and fight back, whether against evil white racist politicians, evil racist cops, evil abusive parents, and (of course) evil gang bangers who oppress their own people.
Comeuppance? Yes. The last line of the movie is "Welcome to hell, motherfuckers!"

The People Under The Stairs
Plot: A family of rich white people live locked up in a giant mansion in the middle of the ghetto. There are rumors that they have piles of money hidden in the basement, so a group of local kids break in to get it. They discover that the family has a bunch of abused kids that they keep in the basement, and set them free.
The moral: Rich people are evil.
Comeuppance? Yes. The evil white people are defeated by a nice black kid from the ghetto, who teams up with the abused children under the stairs. And yes, they find the money – and use it only for good things.

Neverwhere
Plot: It turns out that all those crazy homeless people that you see on the street and in the subway are not crazy at all. They can just see a magical underground world of spirits and demons that you don't have access to.
The moral: Don't judge people who seem less fortunate than you are.
Comeuppance? Sort of. The story is fairly complicated – it's a miniseries by Neil Gaiman – but one character does learn a lesson about how people he once considered beneath him are actually powerful figures whom he is lucky to know.

Candyman
Plot: The ghost of a black man murdered for falling in love with a white woman in the 19th century haunts the housing projects of Chicago. Specifically, he haunts a white graduate student studying the legend of his ghost. Which of course turns out to be more than a legend (or is it just all in her head?). In a strange way, they rescue each other: she prevents his story from being forgotten, and he shows her what a bunch of privileged hypocrites her academic colleagues really are.
The moral: Bourgeois white anthropologists shouldn't fuck with ghosts in housing projects.
Comeuppance? Absolutely. In a seriously bloody way. Snotty academics get eviscerated.

I Walked With A Zombie
Plot: The remaining members of a white family that once ran a massive plantation on Saint Sebastian island suffer under voodoo curses from the children of their former slaves. This is an amazing movie from the 1940s which is far smarter and more beautiful than its cheesy title would suggest.
The moral: Just because they're no longer slaves, doesn't mean you're not still oppressing them. And they are really, really pissed at you.
Comeuppance? Zombiefied and ripped apart by their own dysfunction, the plantation owners are finally driven out.

Hostel
Plot: In an unnamed eastern European country, ultra-wealthy people pay big bucks to fatally torture young, kidnapped tourists. Of course it costs a lot more money to torture an American than it does to torture an Armenian.
The moral: In the eyes of rich people, you are just meat to be flayed.
Comeuppance? Not really. One guy gets away, and you may have heard there is a sequel. Basically, the rich get away with murder.

Bones
Plot: The ghost of a kindly pimp (played by Snoop Dogg) wrecks revenge on two wealthy black families who rose up from the ghetto – but never try to use their money to help improve the old neighborhood where they grew up.
The moral: Don't for get where you came from, and always try to help a brother out.
Comeuppance? Fo shizzle.

Underworld
Plot: The vampires are a ruling elite, and werewolves are their slaves and servants. While the vampires get rich and wear expensive goth clothing, the werewolves live imprisoned in rags. Also, the vampires fight among each other to become the wealthiest and most powerful.
The moral: The rich suck the blood out of everybody else. And the poor are in chains.
Comeuppance? The oldest and whitest and richest of the vampires gets slapped down by a biracial vampire-werewolf.

Blade II
Plot: As is often the case, vampires are the ruling class. In this movie they're using crazy genetic engineering to cement their power. Only the biracial human-vampire Blade can stop them.
The moral: The rich suck the genetic material out of everybody else. And the poor are their experiments.
Comeuppance? Hell yes. With Wesley Snipes playing Blade, you have to ask?

Near Dark
The plot: White trash vampires driving an old RV kidnap a nice farm boy and try to turn him.
The moral: When you're down and out, it's like being a vampire in a crappy hotel room shot full of bullet holes in the middle of the day so that the if sun streams through in a million little places. Comeuppance? Dubious. Farm boy gets away, but later goes on to star as Nathan in Heroes. And the vamps get no respect.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1930s version)
The plot: Jekyll is a rising star doctor who wants to marry into a wealthy family. Unfortunately he gulps down a potion which unleashes his lower-class side, Hyde, who only wants to go to burlesque shows and molest dancing girls. Hyde also hates the mincing, bourgeois doctor.
The moral: Class division creates war, even within the same body.
Comeuppance? Nobody gets what they want. Everyone is destroyed.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The plot: Five suburban teens are stalked and killed by rural Texas cannibals.
The moral: Poverty turns people into psychopathic cannibals. Also, it is fun to watch dumb suburban kids get slaughtered.
Comeuppance? Nope.

House Of 1000 Corpses
The plot: Four snotty urban hipsters happen upon a roadside attraction, which they consume with indie-rock irony. Luckily, this flick is directed by redneck rocker Rob Zombie and the roadside attraction is run by a psychopathic family similar to the one in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The trash class anti-heroes carve those ironic sneers right off our urbanites' faces.
The moral: The locals don't appreciate it when you city kids look down on them.
Comeuppance? Let's just say those kids won't be looking down their noses at roadside attractions anytime soon.

Poltergeist
The plot: Wealthy real estate developers decide to build a subdivision on an ancient Indian burial ground. The Indians, who have already suffered enough at the hands of wealthy real estate developers, are not amused. They torment the family of one of the real estate agents, and steal his daughter.
The moral: Genocide is always evil. Genocide which yields profit many generations later is also evil.
Comeuppance? Absolutely. Indian burial ground = 1; middle class subdivision = 0.

Dawn Of The Dead
The plot: Suburban zombies eat each other at the mall.
The moral: Middle class consumerist existence equals death.
Comeuppance? Middle class consumers are turned into zombies. So, yes.

Before emo Spidey, Raimi created the Evil Dead trilogy, as well as Darkman. Whatever you may think of Spider-Man 3, you can't deny that Raimi has cred as a B-movie maker of the highest order. And with Drag Me To Hell, Raimi proves he can still deliver the down-and-dirty with the best of 'em.

The story is pretty simple. Christine (a great, deadpan Alison Lohman) is a loan officer at a bank who wants desperately to get an assistant manager position and escape her hick past as a farm girl. She's dating Clay, a yuppie psychology professor from a rich family in Los Angeles, and this only heightens her anxiety. She wants to be classy enough to impress him and his family, who think he should date lawyers instead of farm girls. Meanwhile, Christine's boss is threatening to promote a man over her - a man they hired only weeks before - because he's able to "crunch the numbers" and "make the tough decisions." So when Christine has to decide whether to give an old woman a third extension on her mortgage payments, she's determined to make the "tough decision" to show her boss she's manager material.

When she denies the woman the loan extension (impressing her boss), it turns out she's messed with the wrong poverty-stricken old lady. She's invoked the wrath of a powerful gypsy who places a nasty curse on her, invoking the goat god Lamia, who wants to snack on our nice white girl's soul instead of leaving her to a future of marrying up and screwing over impoverished immigrants. Thus begins the fun.

As a helpful fortune teller explains to Christine, the Lamia will torment her for three days and then drag her to hell. We watch with increasing anxiety and glee as Christine is beaten up by scary goat-shaped shadows (great Evil Dead-esque effects), barfs up flies, and becomes so distraught that her promotion is threatened. Of course she fights back, becoming tougher and more mean-spirited as Lamia amps up the abuse. There's a great seance scene, involving a hilarious effect with a goat, and a lot of the plot developments may be silly but will still leave you feeling uncomfortable and crawly.

What makes this a brilliant B-movie, instead of merely a SyFy monster-of-the-week, is that it ably touches on real social anxieties. Christine's fears about her job, and being judged for her trashy class background, feel very real despite the cartoony setting. Like all good horror, Drag Me To Hell takes real-life fears, dresses them up in blood-soaked costumes, and sets them running.

It also expresses some anxieties that I'm fairly sure the filmmakers were completely ignorant about. The old immigrant lady who brings down the curse, Mrs. Ganush, is basically a broad racist stereotype. She's called a gypsy, which is a slur for an actual ethnic group called the Roma, who suffer a great deal of discrimination in Europe - in particular, discrimination from landlords among other things. Mrs. Ganush is represented as essentially evil, and as somebody who really doesn't deserve that loan extension (when we see her house, we find that it's in a state of horrible disrepair and is overrun with filthy relatives).

I think this kind of representation is possible only because many Americans don't realize that the Roma are a real people - they think of "gypsies" as fairy people, enchanted beings who don't really exist. Given that the movie is set in Los Angeles, a city packed with immigrants, Mrs. Ganush therefore becomes a kind of stand-in for all immigrants whose religious traditions and language are incomprehensible to the white farm girl. In Drag Me To Hell, immigrants consort with monsters and that is that. Sure, there are a few immigrant characters who try to fight Lamia too, but only after Christine sells all her jewelry to pay them to help her.

Ultimately my point here is that Drag Me To Hell is smart enough to invoke real social anxieties in a coherent (if not always progressive) way. At the same time, it's scary and fun enough that you can choose to watch the entire film without ever having the urge to call bell hooks to come in and give Raimi a slapdown. And in the end, you'll have to decide for yourself whether the movie really thinks that Christine is an innocent victim or deserves what she's gotten.

In fact, Drag Me To Hell perfectly fits the definition of a good summer movie. It's fast and loud, dragging you all over the place in a way that will make you laugh and scream. And when it's over, you'll still be left thinking about economic horror. The movie opens tomorrow. Get your ass out to see it!

Note: As with last year's similar poll, we're not including movies that are expected to be hits, like Star Trek or Terminator. If you want to make a case in the comments as to why you'd be surprised if Star Trek makes tons of money, go ahead. I was debating whether to include Wolverine, but a lot of people seem somewhat pessimistic about its chances now.

Have you never heard of some of these movies? More information about Pandorum is here. More info on District 9 is here. More about Moon is here. And here's Game.

Drag Me To Hell stars Christine (Alison Lohman) as a mortgage broker who's dating the "I'm A Mac" guy. Christine screws over a gypsy lady with one creepy eye and staples in her forehead, to prove to her boss that she deserves the next promotion. And thus, she's doomed to be "dragged to hell" by a demon. Sorry, but if a crazy old lady wearing a scarf and acting like a gypsy comes in and begs you not to kick her out of her home, that's an easy decision. I'll file this under the "I don't want to die a terrible death at the hands of a witchy woman" clause.

That being said, Sam Raimi's first non-spider-related film in ages looks slightly disturbing, mostly due to the scary lady factor, and it's out on May 29th.

[Yahoo]