January's still being pretty skimpy with the DVD treats. This week we get another slob comedy, another football movie, another action movie, another slasher flick and another video-shelf sequel to a movie that nobody really enjoyed all that much in the first place. So please, friends, rent before you buy.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning -- So here we have a prequel to a remake of a classic, and the law of diminishing returns is in full effect. What we were promised -- a dark and nasty tale of Leatherface's icky origins -- is relegated to a sketchy prologue, and the rest of the movie is sub-standard slasher fare in every sense of the term. Points to the team for doling out the gory stuff, but with characters like this (and a pace this glacial) there's very little reason to care who gets sliced and when. Still, the mega-rabid R. Lee Ermey is always good for a few goofy laughs. Extras on the unrated edition include a producer/director audio commentary, a 46-minute 'making of' documentary, four deleted scenes and three alternate endings.

Turns out we were in the mood for a little football this weekend, as Dwayne Johnson (aka the guy who will soon be formerly known as The Rock) and the Gridiron Gang finished first at the box office with $15 million. Pic marks the tenth number one film for Sony this year, breaking the previous record set by the same studio back in 2003.

Despite lukewarm reviews and its debuting in over a thousand less theaters, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia snuck into the weekend's number two spot with $10.4 million. Even with an all-star cast that includes Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank, I'd expect the negative buzz to hurt the film heading into its second week. Let's see if I'm right. With not much family-friendly type stuff out in theaters, Everyone's Hero (the animated film Christopher Reeve was working on prior to his death) snatched up the third spot, bringing in roughly $6.2 million from 2,896 theaters.

With only a couple thousand dollars separating the two, The Last Kiss (in which Zach Braff stars as a guy who's dissatisfied with where his life is at) just barely beat The Covenant (whose $4.7 million marked a 46% drop off in sales from the previous week in which it finished number one), capturing roughly $4.702 million.

Full numbers after the jump.

If there's one thing I don't have, it's attitude. Born and raised in New York City, I've mastered the art of looking like I have attitude by studying those around me ... and it ain't easy. Through my training, I've learned the most important rule to follow while attempting to come off as someone with severe attitude is not to smile. Smiling shows weakness and, because of this, you'll notice that 98% of all New Yorkers rarely smile. Actually that's not true -- they will smile upon seeing something bad happen to another person. They smile because they're so glad it didn't happen to them.

It's okay though -- I've accepted the fact that I don't have attitude. I mean, growing up, I was rarely involved in a situation that forced me to utilize some form of attitude. I never ran with a bunch of punk kids, never played an intense sport like football, never joined the military and I never committed a crime. However, I did play video games and watch MTV. And yet, I don't have an extensive gun collection and never engaged in copious amounts of promiscuous sex. Go figure.

As you may have guessed by now, all of the following films feature characters with attitude. Something I don't have. And never will. I blame you, Carson Daly. Welcome to this week's Trailer Park:

 

 

Hi. My name is Martha, and I'm a sucker for cheesy sports movies. Give me a predictable, moderately well-made story of triumph over adversity -- think Hoosiers, or even Wildcats -- and I'll be there with proverbial bells on, and Kleenex in hand (yes, I'm one of those people who cries at the happy scenes). For that reason, I'm cursing JoBlo as I type for digging up the trailer for Gridiron Gang, an out-of-nowhere football movie starring The Rock (this is confusing because we already knew he had a football movie coming out -- but this isn't it). The movie is, like 90 percent of the projects coming out of Hollywood these days, based on a true story -- there was a TV doc about the team in 1993 -- and is about a renegade coach (that's The Rock) who teaches a motley crew of badass, juvie inmates important life lessons by turning them into a football team. How much do you want to be that, with their four weeks of training, The Rock's kids thump the lily-white, super-fancy team they play in that big final game? Despite The Rock's questionable emoting, I could feel the tears coming just from the preview. Luckily for the suckers among us, though, the movie doesn't come out until September, so we've got some time to steel our heart-strings against its shameless tugging.

[via JoBlo]