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By J. R. Taylor

Boy, do I remember plenty of great independent video stores. A few small chains, too. These were places crammed full of some of the most bizarre Great Lost Films and Insane Schlock ever made available to the viewing public. There'd be all the usual recent box-office hits, of course, but they were competing for space with certain oddities that I've yet to see again on a video-store shelf.

It was a good time to be a film fan in Birmingham, Alabama. That was probably true for people like me in lots of secondary cities. Take a look at all those silver labels on the VHS tapes in my office. I've got piles of wonderful, old, crappy films that were once the property of mom & pop shops in such exotic places as Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh, or Troy, New York. All those stores are gone now.

Come to think of it, so are the remainder stores on Canal Street and 14th Street where I bought all those old tapes on the cheap.

I'm surprised that none of those tapes came from Birmingham's own Video Xpress chain. That company would buy up multiple copies of the most absurd and useless releases imaginable. Those stores were closing by the time I came to New York City in '91, of course. I wasn't surprised to find that Manhattan couldn't offer anything comparable. The 42nd Street grindhouses couldn't compete with the all-night Dario Argento marathons at Birmingham's drive-ins, either.

There was one impressive video store, though, and it was at the entrance of my first Manhattan apartment. I wasn't expecting much when I stopped inside. Instead, I found the video store of my dreams. By which I mean there wasn't a single video in the store that was produced after 1986. I never found out what the store was serving as a front for—nor did I care, even though the "clerks" were certainly irritated every time I came in and actually made them dig up that rotting VHS of, say, Ciao, Manhattan! on the Pacific Arts label.

Hadn't seen a pristine copy of the 1982's fine Alone in the Dark for a while, either, with stars Martin Landau and Jack Palance still years away from their proper comebacks. Sorry to interfere with the day's real business, but I had films to watch. Actually, I always dreaded pulling the wrong film from a shelf that would trigger whatever hidden chambers hiding the store's dark secrets. Or maybe it would've been as simple as bringing a copy of Reefer Madness to the counter.

Since I had to get cable for decent reception, I was pretty much set for late-night screenings of more-recent useless crap. (I'd never bothered to get cable in Birmingham, since the UHF stations there would routinely program whole weeks of Andy Milligan or Cherie Caffaro films.) I would've probably missed out on the whole Hong Kong cinema craze if I hadn't stumbled across that old theater in Chinatown that used to serve up great dumplings at the concession stand. I knew about Kim's Video, but I wasn't going to endure those douchebags behind the counter there unless it was absolutely necessary.

My pseudo-store, however, eventually folded—without assistance from the police, as far as I know. That would've been around '93, by which time you could keep Kim's clerks in their place by calling them "Tarantino." Actually, that original Kim's location on St. Marks had already become a lot less of a big deal. Snide elitist video clerks had joined their twins in used record stores as a tired joke way back in 1987. It's like Jim Rockford explained to old cellmate Isaac Hayes after he tried to look tough by crumpling up a beer can: "Aluminum cans—we're all tough guys now."

Or, in this case, film geeks. It's no wonder that the big chains were able to step in so effortlessly. I probably had to maintain at least 10 different video store memberships between 1995 and 1998, and I can't remember more than maybe three stores by name. None of them was particularly noteworthy in service or stock. There remain a few survivors such as Champagne Video, but Seinfeld reruns have probably kept that place alive

If one store didn't have the tape I needed, the other likely did. Otherwise, I was overnighting bootleg tapes from Seattle or Florida. I never expected to stumble across a really bizarre find in the stores. The boom period of superweird product being churned out to fill up video-store shelves was long over. To quote legendary local filmmaker Roberta Findlay, "There were no more video companies left to sell garbage to."

There was pretty much an established balance between cultish items, box-office hits, and cool classics. Every video store was a hipster depot by default. If a Kim's location insisted on having a section dividing films by cinematographer—with a sign marking the area as "Masters of Light"—well, hey, knock yourself out. It was probably the bright idea of that clerk with the ludicrous Echo & the Bunnymen tattoo. What could be more harmless?

There were still evil empires, though. For example, there was the day that Blockbuster Video came to Chelsea. Maybe their stores were already all over the West Side, but it was kind of a surprise to see one on my block. The local Video Blitz store across the street—notable, as I recall, for an impressive stock of MGM musicals—gamely refused to close their doors. That was admirable, but I still had to use my Blockbuster card a few times. Can't regret it, either, since that allowed me to once see two kids being told that they couldn't rent a horror film with an R-rating.

"Shit," said one of the innocent tykes, "why the fuck is it rated R?"

Anyway, that Blockbuster got blitzed against all odds, and is now some equally ludicrous retail space. Video Blitz should be sponsoring one helluva Gay Pride float every year—if it's even still open nowadays. I quit paying attention around 1999. I'd moved into a place near TLA Video in the West Village, and that pretty much took care of my video needs. The sole exception was when I'd take the PATH to Video Rent-All in Jersey City—still at Christopher Columbus Drive at the Grove Street station—which continues to feature an amazing stock of sun-faded product from defunct video lines such as Magnum, Vestron, and CIC.

And they're not even a front for some criminal activity. Video Rent-All might even be the only local video store where you can rent a VHS of Mickey Dolenz's immortal Night of the Strangler. Or maybe I'm wrong. Don't expect me to be 100 percent on the facts here. It's not like I was taking notes—except maybe for the occasional New York Press "Best Of" issue. You're better checking off someone's rental habits as detailed in some old fanzine. Remember those? They're about as obsolete as my Sony Betamax Video 45 of Rubber Rodeo songs. Now let's put all this nostalgia behind us and go check out a blog about DVDs.