The Last Video Store, 2023.
Directed by Cody Kennedy & Tim Rutherford.
Starring Yaayaa Adams, Josh Lenner, Matthew Kennedy, Kevin Martin, and Leland Tilden.
SYNOPSIS:
A cursed video tape unleashes the characters from some of the movies stocked in the last video rental store still trading.
The cursed video tape is hardly an original idea, and hasn’t the 1980s/’90s nostalgia for video rental shops been and gone? Possibly, but there is always room on the shelf for one more trip down memory lane when it comes to highlighting how much fun it was back in the day, scanning the shelves for the latest low-budget cult movies released on dodgy distribution labels, each title more ludicrous than the last.
And that is precisely the kind of nostalgia that The Last Video Store is attempting to conjure up. Does it succeed? Well, yes to a large degree, although – much like the movies it is trying to make you go all dewy-eyed for – once you get past the initial idea and aesthetics there are issues.
With its foot planted firmly in the realm of meta storytelling, The Last Video Store sees Nyla (YaaYaa Adams) returning her deceased father’s rented VHS tapes to the backstreet basement store they came from. The store is run by Kevin (real-life DVD store owner Kevin Martin), who is grateful to see the tapes come back but finds that one of them is not a stock item. Said tape is ‘The Videonomicon’ (see what they did there?), a tape that when played brings to life some of the characters from certain movies in the store, and unfortunately for Kevin and Nyla – who is too young to have experienced the independent video stores of yesteryear and receives on-the-spot training from Kevin about how those movies were made – the characters who come to life include a giant alien bug, a hockey-mask wearing killer (sounds familiar) and a ‘cop on the edge who does things his way’. Don’t have this trouble with streaming…
Which is sort of the point that Kevin is making throughout the movie, because The Last Video Store really is a labour of love for its creators Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford, its dialogue full of wry comments about how vacuous and soulless the modern way of consuming movies – represented by Nyla – is, and how exciting and rewarding the experience of watching Predator on a VHS tape is; just check out Kevin’s deflated reaction when Nyla asks if Predator is a movie – we’ve all been there.
The Last Video Store is trying to evoke an era so, naturally, everything is drenched in neon pink, there are movie posters and visual references everywhere – it is also helpful if you are geek-level familiar with the likes of Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead, Dirty Harry and pretty much all of Charles Band and Stuart Gordon’s output – and Kevin is very much the typical fountain-of-all-knowledge when it comes to his precious VHS cassettes, even down to his trailer voiceover style of line delivery. However, after about 45 minutes the joke starts to get a little stale, the exaggerated ‘80s-isms get a little bit annoying and the movie starts to run out of steam, mainly because The Last Video Store is a short-story idea bulked up to fill a feature-length running time, which is still fairly short at 78 minutes but the script struggles to keep up the momentum for the duration.
The disc itself comes with a slew of extras, the most helpful being an interview with its key creators, but there are also video essays by film critics Heather Wixon and Martyn Pedlar to add some perspective if you weren’t quite getting all the in-jokes and references. The original 2013 short film upon which this movie is based – which also features Kevin Martin – is also included, and despite a slightly different story and cheaper production values it works a whole lot better thanks to being only ten minutes long and not forced to fill a longer runtime. Nevertheless, when it comes to the main feature, it is a visual feast to take in and for those of us of a certain age it does recreate the thrill of watching CGI dinosaurs before Steven Spielberg cornered the market with his big-budget studio productions. It is just a shame that the novelty wears a bit thin in its second half and, ironically, you may find yourself looking for something else to watch (or rent).
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
