The Weekend Blues: Blu-ray releases in brief

From overly muscled aliens to horror meta-commentary, from zombie cats to lost-and-found babies — these are the Blu-rays you should be buying this week.

Ah, Prometheus: a bit like the actual Prometheus, you were a little divisive. You brought fire to humanity and angered the gods, but your filmic namesake just seemed to anger anyone who wanted an alien prequel.

In fairness, Prometheus had some baffling moments — seriously, was that guy a biologist or the staffer at a petting zoo, because that is one weird way to react to a [spoiler redacted] — but it's a visually stunning flick, and we can all agree to that.

The two-disc Blu-ray release packs in seven hours of extras and a few deleted scenes that Fox believes will help people make a little more sense of the plot. (There's a joke here about the fact that Prometheus had a brother called Epimetheus whose name roughly translates as "afterthought", but we'll leave it for the professors.) More importantly, as far as we're concerned, it has a second screen app similar to the Avengers release. We'll be playing with the app next week, and will give you our opinion then. In the meantime, get Prometheus from 17 October.

Another film that divided people — in this case bodily — was The Cabin In Woods. Billed in some advertising as "Joss Whedon's Cabin in the Woods" it was actually directed and written by Drew Goddard, with Joss just flinging in some of his usual jokes and actors (we assume). It's clever, compelling and finally got released after only two or so years of the studio sitting on it for no good reason. The Blu-ray from Roadshow might set you back AU$50, but it's worth every penny as far as we're concerned.

Speaking of Joss Whedon, the much-maligned Dollhouse is getting a Blu-ray release for its first season, thanks to Fox. The series had one or two stumbles, like so many Whedon projects, but ultimately proved to be crackingly good fun, especially in the second season, when everyone knew they weren't getting renewed and everything got thrown to the winds. Big thumbs up from us for the fact that the disc has the unaired, original pilot on it. Hopefully, post-Avengers, one of the networks might actually cut Joss a break rather than just cutting up his work and hoping for the best.

(Credit: Roadshow)

While we're on the topic of tenuously linking paragraphs, Pet Sematary has a lot of cutting in it, including a scene involving a scalpel and an Achilles tendon that we can still picture despite not having watched the film adaptation of one of King's more "meh" books since 1991. It's not the best King film, but Paramount is doing the right thing, pricing wise; it's only AU$15 for the Blu-ray.

Moving from cheap films to cheap laughs (and resulting in a certain symmetry to this whole piece), Warner Bros has put together The Todd Phillips Collection, ensuring that you can have The Hangover, The Hangover Part II, Project X and whatever the hell Due Date is, all in one set. If that's your kinda thing, then this is great value, and, in all fairness, it strikes us as the kind of thing that, when you arrive home fairly drunk in the wee hours with a few fellow closing-time refugees in tow, would be a blast to pop on the TV and slowly doze off to while continuing to drink. Actually, that sounds like a pretty good weekend — we'll see you there.