Ten years in the making, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have finally made good on their promise to record a commentary track for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. The only catch is that the track is exclusive to the new Blu-ray release of the film (Paramount Home Entertainment, $30), and the movie's crude animation doesn't benefit much from the format's higher resolution.

Unusually straightforward and honest, the normally irreverent duo begin by admitting they don't remember a lot of details about the making of the 1999 film. But they still come up with enough anecdotes to make the track live up to expectations.

Although the idea for the movie was making ``an R-rated cartoon about an R-rated cartoon,'' Parker and Stone admit they received enormous pressure from the studio to deliver a PG-13 picture and were even forced to sit through a presentation by accountants explaining how much more money they stood to make if they softened the film.

The duo also reveals the studio hated their decision to turn the movie into a musical, and marketing executives hid the fact from the film's trailers and marketing materials. Only after one of the songs was nominated for an Oscar (Blame Canada) did Paramount ever concede the musical idea was a good one.

Parker and Stone recount the Oscar nomination experience extensively, including their decision to wear dresses to the Academy Awards (they almost chickened out at the last minute). Eventually, the duo invites members of the South Park staff into the recording booth with them to help jog their memories.

But the stories never stop coming, whether it's Metallica's James Hetfield agreeing to sing the song that is heard when Kenny goes to hell (but asking for his name to be kept off the credits), or Paramount's accounting practices, which claim the film is still $40-$50 million in the red (even though it only cost $20 million and grossed $60 million), so they've never received a single royalty check from it. As for the movie, South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut remains hilarious and astonishingly daring, even for people who aren't fans. For an added kick, try watching it with Spanish subtitles.

`NATURAL BORN

KILLERS: DIRECTOR'S CUT'

Warner Bros. has finally released another controversial film that has stood the test of time: the unrated, uncensored version of Oliver Stone's 1994 Natural Born Killers as an Unrated Director's Cut ($21 DVD, $29 Blu-ray). Previously available in a crummy-looking DVD, the uncut NBK looks and sounds spectacular on Blu-ray, and the frantic editing and multitude of film stocks Stone employed still feel radical, if no longer ahead of their time.

Destined to be seen as a turning point in Stone's career, Natural Born Killers' observations on the media and our collective fascination with the lurid are more relevant than ever in the reality-TV era, and this bloodier, gorier cut of the movie (which also reinstates the legendary Ashley Judd sequence) hammers the satire home more strongly than before. The Blu-ray disc collects all the previously available extras about the film, including the terrific Chaos Rising: The Storm Around Natural Born Killers made in 1996. A new supplement, the entertaining 25-minute NBK Evolution: How Would It All Go Down Now? uses fresh interviews with Stone, actors Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis and a slew of Internet experts to envision how Mickey and Mallory Knox's reign of terror would spread in the era of Twitter and YouTube.

DRAG ME TO HELL

Sam Raimi's ridiculously entertaining funhouse-ride horror show about a bank executive (Alison Lohmann) cursed by an old hag, Drag Me to Hell has been released in theatrical or unrated director's cut editions (Universal Home Entertainment, $30 DVD, $40 Blu-ray), but there are only a few seconds' worth of difference between the two versions, because the film was designed to scare viewers without grossing them out (too much).

The movie's phenomenal sound mix, which is responsible for three-fourths of the plentiful scares, has been so lovingly transferred to Blu-ray that you'll constantly be looking behind you, just to make sure that demon really isn't there. The only extra, sadly, is 35 minutes' worth of production diaries, shot on the set and hosted by actor Justin Long. The footage is fun, but here's hoping a more deluxe version, with Raimi's active participation in the supplements, arrives some day.

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