Trashy American dating shows: how can you not love them, really? I’m not proud of it, but put me in front of a TV with a cable hook-up and I can spend hours watching Blind Date, or, in a pinch, Elimidate. (It’s probably the single best reason I don’t have cable.) I’d thought that the preening lunkheads and harpies of Blind Date were something special, but to my delight and horror, I found that they were nothing next to Rock of Love With Bret Michaels, truly one of the most far-out “reality” shows out there.

Michaels is of course the lead singer of Poison, and in the introductory voice-over to the show, he talks about how his position allowed him to spend his life sleeping with the “most beautiful women in the world,” but that he’s now looking for true companionship. What better way to find true love than to fill a weird Los Angeles mansion with 25 love- and lust-struck women and let them fight over you?

His suitors, as it were, are a desperate-seeming (one particularly crazy lady avoids being kicked out by protesting “I had a hat made!”) and seemingly perpetually drunk, almost all of them sporting some cosmetic augmentation. “I love my boobs,” says one. “They’re the best birthday present I got… from my parents… last year.” It’s all a little sordid and sorry, but entertaining too, if you’re into the truly weird ass-end of the reality TV genre.

No Country for Old Men is still out in theatres, basking in that Oscar glow, but it’s also available on DVD this week, if you don’t feel like making it out or just want to watch it multiple times. I’m looking forward to re-watching it and enjoying Roger Deakins’s magnificent cinematography all over again, or maybe just waiting for There Will Be Blood to hit the streets and having an Intense Bleak Deadly American Dudes film festival.