VIDEOHEAVEN - Mark Reviews Movies

Videoheaven, Cinema Conservancy

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 5, 2025

There are multiple generations of people whose love for and knowledge of film were greatly aided by the existence of video-rental stores. Surely, director Alex Ross Perry, who is in one of those generations and worked at such a shop before becoming a filmmaker, has some fond memories of those places. He has put that into the essay-like documentary Videoheaven, which communicates the existence and general experience of video-rental shops through the lens of existing media. Basically, what did the movies show and tell us about the stores where so many people discovered and/or deepened their appreciation of the movies?

The film is, to some degree, an act of nostalgia. That's unavoidable, since the entirety of the documentary is assembled from other movies, mostly from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and advertisements for the stores it's recalling. The narration, provided by Maya Hawke (the actress whose breathy voice here sounds so much like her famous mother that its presence is almost nostalgic onto itself), is full of as much fond reminiscence as it is insight into the history of the VHS format—from its gradual rise into becoming commonplace technology that everyone took for granted, to its sudden, nearly complete decline into a cultural artifact.

What's most fascinating, apart from the story the film tells, is how Perry makes the clearly personal into something that feels more historically and culturally significant than the subject might suggest. Only certain audiences will care about the topic of a now-dead media format and economic market. That's entirely because of the memories that those audience members hold of browsing shelves, filled with video cassettes of favorite or yet-to-be-seen movies, and popping those tapes into a VCR back home.

What, however, does that mean to everybody else, especially those who might only know about the existence of video-rental shops as a period detail in a modern movie or TV show? Hawke herself, for example, might be right on the cusp of being part of a generation whose personal experience with a video store would have been limited or non-existent. There she is, though, in clips assembled by Perry and editor Clyde Folley, playing a character working behind the counter of a chain rental place on "Stranger Things." It still means something, even if it is only history and nostalgia.

One imagines our narrator had some experience with VHS tapes and video stores, if only because her father is also right there in the opening moments of Perry's documentary. He's the actor Ethan Hawke, of course, who played the title character in a then-modern-day version of Hamlet from 2000, where the famous "To be or not be" soliloquy was set inside a video store. The context is that such a place was such a ubiquitous part of society and culture that the most famous speech in theater could be staged there without anyone batting an eye.

Perry's film, though, is a history lesson initially, as the filmmaker sets the earliest examples of movie scenes set in a video store against ads promoting the nascent tape-based format. From the very start, Perry almost seems to suggest that the movies had it out for this new, highly accessible way of watching movies at home.

Those early movies, such as Brian De Palma's Body Double, coupled the experience of video stores and VHS tapes with taboo and danger. When Perry's written narration discusses how some movie studios and theaters feared a decline in theatrical attendance because of the ease of watching at home, we're thrust right back into our own modern times and concerns of what streaming services have done and continue to do to how people watch movies.

The documentary is divided into several chapters—some dealing with history and others tackling more specific topics. One section, for example, is dedicated to the "adult" areas of video stores. It's not about pornography, though, but about how movies and television depicted the existence of porn as both a basic fact and a reason for shame. It's somewhat connected to another tangent, in which video stores initially brought about a panic about kids having easier access to bloody horror movies, happening alongside the Satanic panic about certain music, but then gave rise to another phenomenon. It's that oddly American double-standard that violence is okay for their kids to watch, while even a bit of sexuality or nudity makes a movie completely off limits.

Meanwhile, the most sizeable section of the film is dedicated to clerks at video stores. It's a strange area of focus, until one suspects that Perry might have had that job at one point in his life. He did, as it turns out, so the depiction of the video store employee must still be a sticking point for the filmmaker.

That makes sense, since so many of the ones in the movies and on TV shows were either uncomfortably obsessed with or completely apathetic about movies, while generally making the experience of going to the video store an unpleasant one. How much of those cultural depictions might have been part of the reason for the decline in business? Also, how funny is it that Perry finds three examples of David Spade playing a clerk, as well as the connection of Jack Black playing one who remakes Driving Miss Daisy to playing a movie-score composer who uses a trip to a video store to comment on the quality of that film's soundtrack?

Videoheaven is an exhaustive look back at the past of a medium, a business model, and an experience that have all but vanished. Even at nearly three hours, though, the film isn't exhausting, because it's crafted so well and cleverly.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products