This will bring back memories.

Nice. I know Alex Ross Perry through his somewhat regular appearances on the Blank Check podcast which he's always great on but have never checked out one of his films. Will make sure to see this.

I find him close to insufferable on those episodes, as knowledgeable as he is, he also won't shut up (and he ruined The Bit!)

I was very let down by the killing of The Bit! I only came to the show last year so have been listening to current episodes but also jumping around a ton and I heard that the Clockwork Orange episode was it before I got to it so I was really looking forward to a good send off at least but felt it didn't even do that well. R.I.P. The Bit

Still one of the guys I look for as a guest if I'm deciding between back episodes but can see how he may rub some the wrong way.

I was interested in this movie until I saw it had a 3 hour run time! This guy must not know how to get to the point.

I would be interested in this. It's on the festival circuit right? So probably won't be on VOD for a few months.

The running time doesn't seem that excessive to me. You're talking about nearly 4 decades of a lifespan of an activity we all used to do every weekend.

They made a 2 hour 43 minute documentary "We Kill for Love" about the erotic thriller genre. So 173 minutes for an era of pop culture history doesn't seem that crazy.

I may watch it if it becomes available on streaming somewhere but I’m kind of over the fact that our generation seems to need a documentary on EVERYTHING we consider even slightly nostalgic.

I could easily watch far more than 3 hours of video store footage. The past documentaries haven’t been long enough!

That song at the end of the trailer is from a 1983 sex comedy called Getting it On, where a perverted kid starts a video surveillance business to watch and tape naked girls. A personal favorite of mine.

I was happy to find this tape about how to prevent shoplifting in your video store:

Actually, tied to this documentary, I really love his Halloween episode and his talk about VHS culture being a huge boon for horror

Hey man. No one 25 years or younger knows what a video store is. Their idea of "renting" is clicking a button on their remote. I think it's good to have content like this out there.

Given that both Rewind This! and Adjust Your Tracking were a bit underwhelming to me, I've got faith that this could be the definitive doc on VHS thus far.

Maybe. I said I’d watch it as it looks mildly interesting to me so it’s certainly isn’t a hill I’m ready to die on but I wonder how many people under the age of 25 are going to want to watch a 3 hour documentary about something they’ve never experienced.

I think the intended audience is all of us middle-aged dudes trying to recapture our youth.

I’ve seen three of Perry’s features and thought they were ok, but when the trailer for this popped into my YouTube feed last week, I honestly thought it was one of the older video store documentaries that have already been made. The subject has been done to death. Then I saw the 2025 date, and the three hour run time, and the fact that it was entirely a clip show, and my interest dipped. I suppose it could turn out to be the ‘last word’ on the whole notion of video stores and related nostalgia for them in general, and the reviews have generally been good-not-great while acknowledging that it can be an endurance test (or an extended YouTuber-style “documentary” as the one IMDb review so far notes). Based on some of the reviews, Perry has gone pretty far down the rabbit hole in sourcing clips from everything from big-budget Hollywood movies to TV shows to bottom-feeder DTV junk like Troma stuff and DISCONNECTED (not surprising since he was an employee of the legendary Kim’s Video), so I’d probably check it out way down the line it out to see how many of his clips I’ve actually seen.

Otherwise, part of me would be happy with a gradual end to this era of increasingly niche nostalgia documentaries – often featuring clips galore and/or supplemented with talking heads you don’t know or care about claiming to be “media historians’ or ‘pop culture experts’ and the like – that everybody and their mother seem to be cranking out these days, especially on YouTube and cable. VIDEOHEAVEN seems like Perry covers well-trodden ground in the only way that hadn’t been done yet on the scale that he does it: a show about video stores made entirely of clips set in video stores taken from old videos.

Not just the audience, but in all of these docs, they’re also the subject matter, too, endlessly lamenting.

On that note, I suspect most folks here have already seen these but just in case here are trailers for most of the other video store docs of recent vintage. Barring minor differences, they often feel like the same movie:

Makes me wish I'd taken photos of the various video stores I went to as a kid and in my teens though I'm sure you'd get funny looks back then walking around taking pictures inside. Funny to hear the gas station line because we had one that rented movies too and we ended up getting something from it one time because it was unavailable everywhere else. Totally forgotten what movie that was. Some stores had a membership fee to sign up so I think my folks avoided those.

Serious question. What would happen if no one in the world under the age of 25 know what a video store was? Does it matter even in the slightest?

Alright, I get you and a few others believe it’s pointless nostalgia. As only old dudes might care.

I’m not sure nostalgia is pointless – at least to an individual – but we’re definitely in an era where nostalgia for everything – regardless of what generation one hails from – has literally been strip-mined and monetized by social media “documentarians” (I use that term loosely) and even mainstream media to a degree. Think of some random show or event or place or tchotchke from your formative years, and you’ll find multiple videos about it in no time. It’s just a bit much sometimes, but I suppose it’s now the only way we can collectively ‘preserve’ many of these things, especially if they date from before the era of people using ubiquitous phone cameras to ‘document’ every minuscule aspect of their lives and hobbies and communities.

I certainly have some nostalgia for video stores and other detritus from my youth, aided for better and for worse by the fact that so little of it ever truly went away, and certainly the very act of collecting physical media now is infused with nostalgia for a lot of folks buying movies multiple times over on format upgrades they might not really need. I’m just not sure I need to see a continuing stream of pop culture documentaries, each increasingly featuring (or made by) the more extreme hobbyists whose nostalgia kinda feels like it borders on arrested development or stasis. Age we live in, I suppose. In fairness, I’m guessing that Perry’s documentary simply takes the only approach to the subject that hasn’t been done yet: video stores wholly as depicted in the film and television, and it could turn out to be an interesting meditation . . . or a three-hour chore.

Ok my comment may have sounded more extreme than intended. I understand as you’ve already brought up that this topic as been covered endlessly in different variations throughout the years. I’m not remotely familiar with this writer and director. Maybe he will offer a different spin that will add something? I don’t know until I actually see it. But, if you feel like you’ve gotten enough material through the years, then great. Not trying to argue with you about the value of this film.

I have no feelings about the movie one way or another. I'm free to watch it or not watch it as I please. But let's not pretend that the audience for this is anyone other than middle aged dudes exactly like all of us.

For what it’s worth - to counter my own argument - there was a local history museum I took my son to a few weeks ago and they had a “90s” exhibit set up with all kinds of local history of the 90s. One display they had set up was a mini Blockbuster Video store. My son was actually pretty interested in it and spent a good bit of time wandering the little aisles they had set up of VHS tapes.

Now would’ve watch a 3 hour documentary on video store? Doubtful but he did show at least a spark of interest. He’s 10 years old.

He might get more (maaayybe ) out of one of the shorter docs I posted trailers for above, some of which are about actual video stores (both back in the day, and the few hipster joints that survive now) and the whole phenomenon rather than the ‘interpretation’ of them through the filter of old TV shows and movies. According to some reviews – and certainly my own memories of some of these clips – the ‘Hollywood’ depictions were sometimes either highly idealized or kinda condescending to the types of people that filmmaker types seemingly assumed worked in every store (some truth to it, but hardly a majority). Even in the trailer, there’s a feeling of the concept being a step removed from the reality because the whole show is made up of fictional clips rather than the (admittedly rare) documentary and news footage that appears in most of those other docs.

Most video store scenes in movies I remember had stuff from the same studio that made the movie. Example The Lost Boys where the mom gets a job in a video store, all the tapes are from Warner.

Pump Up the Volume had a brief moment passing by the outside of a video store, and all the posters were for other New Line movies.

Since The Fisher King had a small joke about porn, the video store in that not only had Columbia Pictures movies but also Caballero, who got a “Special Thanks” in the credits.

This documentary is now available on The Criterion Channel if you’re a subscriber

I heard they have a special “VHS section” there this month, ironic since Criterion never put out VHS tapes.

Janus Films put out a lot of VHS via Home Vision back in the day, including films that became Criterion releases (or maybe were even then on LD?). Not sure if they were connected with Criterion or whatever at the time, though. Others here might know better.