After a film had been in the cinema but before a film was on general sale (also called ‘Home Release’) there would be a window of perhaps a few months where the retail price of a single VHS tape would be about £100 [$133]. In a world of digital media that now feels mad, but it was obviously profitable for the rental shops to buy tapes at that price.
Our local video shop man got into big trouble for making copies. You only needed two VHS machines and a colour photocopier for the box cover and you were in business.MrChevette
My daughter walked past the video store on her way home from school. She knew I loved The Big Lebowski, and she went in on her way home from school and badgered them – canIhavethepostercanIhavethepostercanIhavetheposter – until they finally gave it to her, just in time for my birthday.BeaverHsteman
Blockbuster Friday was a thing with us back in the 90s. Stock up on beer and then take out the dumbest looking horror films we could find. We laughed like drains every week. Good times.
I worked in a video rental store on weekends during college, 2004-2008. And it wasn’t a franchise either, it was a small “mom and pop” store. Best job I’ve ever had, stick a movie on the TV hanging up in the corner of the ceiling, arrange the shelves according to my own whims and fancies, flip through the film magazines that I brought myself, take home the best posters.
I loved tailoring a recommendation for a customer. Considering what they were in the mood for, what actors they liked/disliked, what they’d seen lately. I loved handing a film to a customer on the Friday night shift and then hearing their review on the Saturday afternoon when they returned it.MarySays
I worked in video stores for years; I remember, one evening, these two guys and a woman came in to the store I was working at in a decidedly rural part of Arizona. They looked around for a bit and picked out some action movies, It had been a slow evening, and my co-worker and I had been watching Much Ado About Nothing on the store’s video monitor. While the one guy was checking out the videos, the woman and the other guy walked over to the monitor and started watching the film. After he finished checking out, the first guy joined the others in front of the monitor. They stood there watching for quite a while. Finally, the first guy turned to his companions and exclaimed, “I can’t understand a d*mned thing their saying.”
My co-worker had to retreat to the back of the store because she was laughing so hard.DWGrasse
Remember we hired Defence of the Realm from our local Threshers (a surprisingly good selection!) and then forgot to take it back. We only realised thick end of a year or so later and can vividly remember my mum’s meltdown – she thought the late payments were going to bankrupt us (imagine if they’d insisted on a daily late rate, we could have paid for the film. Like, the making of the film). Fortunately it was SO late they couldn’t find our card in the pile and had no idea we’d had it so long. Upshot – we didn’t go bankrupt. Great film though.johnnysmooth
Worked in a video store in suburban Dublin, summer of 1996, I guess. A gentleman came in and asked me for a ‘cowboy picture’ to rent, adding that he’d seen them all since the 50s. Wayne, Eastwood, Cooper. You name it, son! So I recommended his Jarmusch’s Dead Man.
He returned it the next day or should I say threw the video tape at me and just said ‘Kerrr-AP!’
So I asked him what his favourite western was and maybe I could find something similar.
City Slickers 2, he deadpanned.FatEric
When we got our first VHS player, probably around 87 or 88, my family used to rent films from our local Mobil garage. It had a small-but-decent selection, although by the end of the 1980s we had moved on to a bigger independent rental shop a couple of miles away, which was still going strong well into the 2000s.
My parents would naively/happily rent stuff for me and my friends to watch after school on a Friday, usually 15 or 18 certificates when we were really too young for some of the content. I remember that they were quite surprised by Robocop in particular, but they still carried on renting whatever I asked for, however inappropriate it was for a young teenager. During one screening of the dismal horror film Geek (also known as ‘Backwoods’) my mum came into the lounge with a tray of sandwiches and drinks for me and my friends just as the redneck antagonist was biting the head off a live chicken, and to this day I remember her exclaiming: ‘Oh no, no, that’s not very nice at all,’ before walking out of the room and letting us watch the rest of the film.ProfyleNeim
I was 14 when my older brother moved back home, bringing with him a VCR – a game changer at the time. Our local record shop had just started renting out tapes, and one in particular caught my eye: The Terminator. Somehow, despite being underage, I managed to rent it.
That night, a group of school friends came over, and we watched in stunned silence as Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged from the time displacement sphere and began his relentless, robotic hunt for Sarah Connor. We were completely blown away.
Since that night, I’ve owned The Terminator in nearly every format it’s been released – VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and now 4K UHD. Almost 40 years on, it still stands as my all-time favourite film.Dotcom1970
My first video rental store was on Elliot St in Liverpool city centre. It was £30 to become a member, thought it was outrageous then, and still do to this day, 40 years down the line. The good films were hard to obtain, constantly in and out the store, leaving you to hire the dregs of what was left, mainly dubbed graphic horror B films, that must have been made at a cost of a few dollars with a free doughnut thrown in for good measure (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) exempt. But when one of those elusive films that you had your heart set on happened to be on the shelf eg Midnight Express or Blazing Saddles, remember just buzzing with excitement, and couldn’t wait to get back home, and insert and press play.Aubrey26
Traipsing along to the pokey video store with my dad midweek and mustering up the courage to ascend the dim staircase to the upstairs horror section where, by the stark illumination of a single lightbulb, my young eyes widened to the lurid cover artwork of X-rated nasties in chunky VHS cases, which were all adorned with the sticky thumbprints of a hundred different households as in those days the stores didn’t have generic rental cases for customers to take home. One of my happiest memories, and an experience that in no small part contributed to both my adult love of the extreme horror genre and physical media in general. I can still smell the musty carpet to this day.Bartel
As a kid in the 80s, my mum used to take us to this back street video store in Blandford Forum, which was basically someone’s house with the store being down in the cellar. I used to lust after the lurid artwork on the clamshell videos in the horror and sci-fi section with titles such as Hell Comes To Frogtown, The Burning, Basket Case, Island Of Death etc. My mum once mistakenly rented us the Randy Quaid-starring Parents instead of Parenthood which is an altogether different proposition ...
The woman who ran the shop took a shine to me and held back (in hindsight, really inappropriate!) promo posters for me as she knew how much I loved the art. As a tweenager, my bedroom wall boasted huge posters of Brain Damage, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome.
I miss those days terribly: doom-scrolling through an endless trail of bilge on Amazon Prime just doesn’t cut it ...TeeDubyaBee
Growing up I had a video rental shop five minutes from my house called Videotronic. On a Friday night my siblings and I, along with the kids who lived next door, would troop down there to rent something like Short Circuit, Labyrinth or The Princess Bride.
One strong memory I have is the the covers of the horror movies – things like Troll, Shocker, Fright Night, House, Hellraiser – they felt like they represented some deep dark adult world that I didn’t have access to and didn’t know if I ever wanted to. I’m sure some of them aren’t nearly as frightening as the cover art suggested to me at the time.
The other thing was the Street Fighter cab they had in the back. I’m talking about the original Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, not any of the later revisions. We were completely obsessed with it, but my parents were quite strict with money and it was rare joy to be given a pound to put into it.Sam_Jenks