New on DVD: A glittering, gay "Pageant" plus British comedy and vintage chills

Glamour and gourmet cuisine get their close-ups in this week's new gay DVDs, while the best of the Brit-coms help fill out the rest of the New Releases shelf.

Read on for more!

Pageant introduces us to the 52 men who, without hormones or surgical augmentation, drag it up each year to compete in the Miss Gay America pageant. A hit at film festivals around the country, this documentary takes us backstage to see each contestant's support team and the love, sweat and wigs involved with winning this extremely competitive contest.

Fans of Pedro Almodóvar will recognize several cast members in the new comedy Chef's Special, starting with Talk to Her's Javier Cámara, who stars here as an overstressed chef who finds himself the unwilling guardian of his two children after his wife—marriage was an unsuccessful side road on his path to coming out—passes away. When a sexy Argentine soccer player moves in down the hall, the chef and his female best pal (Lola Dueñas of Volver and the upcoming Broken Embraces) find themselves vying for his attention.

Speaking of Spain, Iberian filmmaker Carlos Saura continues his series of documentaries on the world of dance with Fados, a look at the passionate Portugese style. Caetano Veloso is one of several major musicians on hand; if you're a fan of dance on film, Saura's movies are indispensable.

It's a great week for TV comedy collections—two of the best British sitcoms ever made are featured in the souped-up box sets Fawlty Towers: The Complete Collection Remastered and Black Adder Remastered: The Ultimate Edition. And if you were annoyed that the only DVD set for The Larry Sanders Show took a "best of" approach rather than a completist one, at least you can now include It's Garry Shandling's Show: The Complete Series in your collection.

Another reliable source of laughs for me was the melodramatic goings-on over at Showtime's The L Word. (I was never a huge fan of Queer as Folk, since I knew what they were getting wrong about gay life; since I'm not a lesbian, though, I felt free to enjoy the looniness of The L Word without having a stake in whether or not the show was true to life.) The lesbian soap's truncated Final Season, which never bothered to solve the whole "Who Killed Jenny Schechter?" mystery, debuts on DVD this week, and just in time for the holidays, the L-lover in your life will doubtless be thrilled at the prospect of unwrapping The Complete Series Pack.

And while we're on the subject of the holidays, Halloween is nearly upon us. Kick it old-school with The William Castle Collection, celebrating the chilling movies and shameless showmanship of the man who gave us such classics as The Tingler and Homicidal. (If you know the twist of the latter movie, don't spoil it for your friends until they see it.) This new five-disc set includes eight Castle chillers as well as the new documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, directed by gay documentarian Jeffrey Schwarz (Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, Starz's upcoming Sex and the Cinema).

Madonna continues her ventures on the other side of the camera with the documentary I Am Because We Are, about the more than one million children in Malawi who have been orphaned by the nation's AIDS epidemic. The writer-producer used her substantial clout to get heavy hitters like Bill Clinton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to share their thoughts on camera.

Finally, our Title of the Week just has to be the 1973 made-for-TV movie Satan's School for Girls. Those of us who grew up in the '70s were all damaged in one way or another by the dark and horrifying stuff they used to get away with on network TV, from Bad Ronald and Born Innocent to Karen Black and that damn doll in Trilogy of Terror. Satan's features a doozy of a cast, including future Charlie's Angels stars Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd, Dynasty's Lloyd Bochner, cult queen Pamela Franklin and veteran character actors Roy Thinnes and Jo Van Fleet. Worth a look; just make sure you don't get the defanged 2000 remake (starring Shannen Doherty) by mistake.