{Movie Review} Be Kind Rewind: The Last Video Store (2023)

“We just experienced the power of cinema.”

One of the weirdest things about the media ecosystem in which we live is that we are all encased in layers of goony corporatized nostalgia. Of course, the big productions are steeped in it, churning out “cinematic universes” and legacy sequels and live-action remakes and… not much else. But so are many of the indie productions and the arthouse flicks. It’s just that the nostalgia is for slightly different things.

Directed by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford (who also co-wrote it with Joshua Roach), The Last Video Store is essentially an expanded version of their short “M is for Magnetic Tape,” created as part of a contest for a spot in ABCs of Death 2. The short is available on YouTube but, for those who haven’t seen it, is an homage to a variety of low-rent action movie cliches from the golden age of home video.

Kevin Martin (who will reprise his role in The Last Video Store) plays a video store clerk who is confronted by ninjas and a crime lord with a fake mustache, who try to get him to give up a mysterious tape with power that can be used “for world domination.” To defend himself, the clerk transforms, tokusatsu-style, into a mystic warrior with an armored body made from videocassettes and magnetic tape and dispatches the various antagonists in bloody fashion.

Recently released on Arrow Blu after playing the festival circuit, The Last Video Store is only slightly less goofy. Yaayaa Adams plays a young woman whose deceased father left her a note asking her to return his overdue videos to the eponymous store, a literal basement hole-in-the-wall located in an alley called Blaster Video. Thrown in with his three rentals is a fourth tape, the cursed “Videonomicon.”

As Adams and Martin’s video store clerk (here simply named Kevin) banter, he shows her the tapes that she’s returning, inadvertently exposing all of them to the power of the cursed tape, which brings elements of them to life inside the video store. These include a CGI bug monster drawn out of a low-rent Predator-alike, a hockey-masked killer from the fourth installment of a Canadian slasher franchise, and the action star of Fury of the Viper.

Where a big-budget Hollywood production has access to actual corporate IP that it can grave rob for its nostalgic cash grabs, a movie like this has to settle for also-ran imitations – but those are also what it is actually being nostalgic for anyway.

The walls of the video store in question are plastered with posters for both VHS trash classics like Miami Connection and Robot Jox as well as the modern throwback indies that are its contemporaries, including several posters for Psycho Goreman and The Editor.

For those who have never attended or listened to the live podcast that I co-host with Tyler Unsell once a month at the Stray Cat Film Center, we have a segment on the show where we each suggest two movies to pair with the one that we just discussed. Movies that share themes, or vibes, or would just make a good double-feature. If I were doing that with The Last Video Store, the two films I would suggest are VHYes (2019) and The Dungeonmaster (1984). (With an honorable mention for The Final Girls from 2015.)

The reason for VHYes is probably pretty obvious, but Dungeonmaster is maybe the more telling of the two. Not only is it a movie about the main character switching through segments that are different genres – a form that is also reflected in one of the in-world movies in Last Video Store – but it’s a movie from the heyday of Empire, one of the companies most responsible for making the kinds of films that The Last Video Store is nostalgic for.

If you know any tapeheads, you know that there are layers there, too. Some folks are into the nostalgic hit of the movies that were big when they were kids. They want VHS copies of Scream and Jurassic Park and Batman Returns. Others are into the stuff that pretty much only existed on VHS. The folks who are seeking out releases from Vestron Video and companies like Full Moon and Empire. And then there are those who go deeper still, pulling out regional shot-on-video oddities that barely got releases at all. It goes on and on.

The folks behind The Last Video Store are reaching out to that second kind of tapehead, and the movies that this film is nostalgic for are those kinds of direct-to-video releases that were a staple of the video store shelves during the golden age of VHS.

Even then, this is all stuff that we’ve seen before. Nostalgia for “so-bad-it’s-good” movies has become the de facto setting of much indie horror fare in recent years, as is pointed out in a review in Starburst which calls Last Video Store “a lot of fun, but we can’t help feeling that it’s all been done before.” And not just in the films that it’s referencing, but in countless other flicks that have traded on this same sort of sentimental VHS nostalgia, from Scare Package (2019) to Beyond the Gates (2016) and numerous others besides.

The result, in this case, is an earnestly goofy flick that doesn’t always land. When it does, though, what helps to elevate it above the crowd are some genuinely clever designs (the VHS monster near the end is great) and some interesting thematic choices – what they do with Jackson Viper is especially good. Similarly, the gags range from formulaic to inspired, with one repeated bit involving a severed head a particular standout.

If there’s a beating heart in The Last Video Store, however, it’s underneath all that. It comes not when the film is being a love letter to the movies themselves – no matter how much Kevin might talk them up – but when it is instead a paean to sharing them with someone. To sitting down in the dark and watching, laughing, and bonding together. Even that may be a bit trite, but it’s what helps keep The Last Video Store from falling into a pit of hollow nostalgia that has consumed so many other movies before it.