450 snakes, 4 supernatural students

"Snakes on a Plane" (New Line): A slow post-holiday week for DVD releases suitably is led by Hollywood's underachiever of 2006. Samuel L. Jackson's outrageously plotted airborne thriller was supposed to ride its unprecedented wave of Internet buzz to hit status, but the gross-out B-movie ended up pulling in a modest audience at best.

Jackson plays a federal agent escorting a witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles to testify against a murderous crime boss, the assignment hitting extreme turbulence when the mobster's henchmen smuggle loads of deadly snakes onto the plane full of innocent but tasty victims.

The DVD features 10 deleted scenes accompanied by commentary from director David R. Ellis, who also joins Jackson for commentary on the full movie. The disc also has a decent range of featurettes on visual effects and the reptile co-stars. There's also a segment that proves outdated, given how the movie fizzled at the box office, the featurette focusing on the creative bloggers and other Web fans who caught on to the movie's campy title and premise and turned it into a cultural — if not commercial — phenomenon.

"The Covenant" (Sony): Another year, another swarm of bad fright flicks. This one has something to do with a pampered, prettified gang of four at an exclusive private school, stars of the swim team who've inherited special powers that have been passed down through their families for centuries. This tight quartet of guys finds trouble when a nasty new student turns up bearing the same powers, the descendant of an exiled fifth family of supernatural folks whose blood line had long been believed extinct.

Director Renny Harlin provides commentary, and the DVD comes with a behind-the-scenes featurette.