Video stores were cool during the dawn of VHS. Exploitation film companies adopted home video more fiercely than anybody back then, so even modest suburban stores often had packed horror sections. Whole walls of sleaze in nightmare-inducing box art. Bloody knives. Dripping axes. Girls wearing nothing but a bikini and a meathook. Severed heads. Severed arms. Zombies. Glowering monsters. Miles and miles of it. Let’s also mention the flood of sex comedies, cheapjack action flicks and shoestring sci-fi. If you were a kid back then—as were most of the tape collectors who confess to their hobby in this entertaining documentary—the video store was a place of forbidden worlds. Movies that scared you, movies that your parents wouldn’t rent for you. We’ll never have that again. Today, “forbidden” just means that Youtube took it down for copyright violation. The personality of an old video store has been replaced 
with the flat vacuum of the internet. The art of tasteless video covers is all but gone. What we have today is progress, no doubt. No good film is any less good streaming on the internet than it is when taken out of a box and inserted into a machine. The loss of video stores isn’t the greatest loss in human history, but it is a loss. It’s not a tragedy, but it is a little like losing a color from the palette. Something’s different.
And I talk about stores here so much because that 80s independent video shop experience is a major part of the fascination for most of the collectors in this movie. (See the guy here who maintains a time warp in his basement in the form of a vintage video store replica, complete with retail-style shelves, a Blockbuster gumball machine, posters and a checkout counter on which sits a circa 1990 computer). Unlike vinyl collectors, nobody here argues for VHS as the top quality format. The closest anyone here gets to that is when filmmaker Linsday Denniberg talks about how she likes way the colors bleed and distort. Pretty much everyone here is purely into the tactile object, that whiff from the past, that little artifact of movie history in the form of a plastic box with a spool of tape inside.
In 2014, VHS is weird again. It’s cool only to a cult, which is cool with me. Small printings of VHS tapes come out today, all by independents and all aimed at lovers of the lowdown genres. It’s an underground worth documenting. See this for a look at what some of the weirdos are up to.
Another VHS documentary, Rewind This!, came out at around the same time.