June 6, 2025
by Carla Hay
“Videoheaven”
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Videoheaven” is an archival documentary about how home videos and video stores changed pop culture from the 1970s to the 2010s.
Culture Clash: The home video revolution created a business boom for video stores from the 1980s to the 2000s, until the rise of streaming services and other digital distribution made video stores obsolete.
Culture Audience: “Videoheaven” will appeal primarily to pop culture enthusiasts who want to see a deep-dive look at how the home video business, especially video stores, affected movies and television.
Depending on your perspective, “Videoheaven” can be enjoyable or an endurance test. This three-hour documentary (about how video stores changed pop culture) is a history presentation that’s better as a three-episode series instead of a feature-length film. Maya Hawke gives delightful narration. “Videoheaven” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.
Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry, “Videoheaven” will have the most appeal to people who avidly collect movies and TV shows to watch at home. These are pop culture enthusiasts who don’t want to wait until they casually stumble upon something to watch. They actively seek out their preferred movies and TV shows and want to own the movies and TV shows they like the most.
“Videoheaven” also has a huge nostalgia factor for viewers who know what it’s like to spend countless hours in a video store—or at least remember when brick-and-mortar video stores were as common as grocery stores. A cinema screen is still considered the most ideal way to watch a movie, but home videos allowed watching of movies and TV shows to more accessible and more convenient than ever before. And for kids who aren’t old enough to see certain movies, home videos have been a gateway to that access.
“Videoheaven” is told in six chapters, with an epilogue. Except for Hawke’s narration that was written specifically for “Videoheaven,” the documentary consists entirely of archival clips. No one is interviewed for the documentary, which is a wise choice because the clips and the narration already provide a wealth of details. However, “Videoheaven” really did not need to be three hours long. The movie could have used tighter editing by making the same points with fewer clips as examples.
The first chapter of “Videoheaven” gives an overview of the invention of the videocassette recorder (VCR) and how VCRs transitioned in the 1970s from being electronic equipment used only in professional environments to being a luxury item that people could use in their homes. By the early 1980s, VCRs became smaller and more affordable for home use—much like computers evolved in the marketplace to become common household items by the 1980s.
As VCR sales began to the rise, the entertainment industry jumped on this popularity by releasing movies and TV shows on videocassettes. To this day, home video sales and rentals are still dominated by movies and TV shows. The Beta tape format was eventually overtaken by VHS. DVDs get a brief mention toward the end of the documentary, which focuses mostly on the decades when videocassettes were the main format to rent and sell movies and TV shows.
The 1980s was first decade of the video store boom, which gets considerable exploration in the documentary. The majority of “Videoheaven” is a deep-dive look at how video stores have been depicted in scripted movies and scripted TV shows from the 1980s to the 2010s. “Videoheaven” doesn’t just include the obvious mainstream choices but also gives considerable screen time to obscure independent films that prominently feature video stores. Troma Entertainment movies (known for their low-budget kitsch), which people often discovered first on home video, get frequent mentions in “Videoheaven.”
“Videoheaven” points out that in early-to-mid 1980s, films such as “Videodrone” (1981) and “Body Double” (1984) often depicted video stores and video watching as alluring but potentially dangerous. By the late 1980s, video stores had become so common, they were usually depicted as community-oriented independent stores or high-tech and flashy corporate retailers. Blockbuster Video is the obvious template for many video stores that fit the corporate-owned description.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the documentary is in showing how pornography impacted the home video business because of porn’s popularity on home video. The “adults only” sections of video stores (which were not allowed at corporate-owned stores but thrived in independently owned stores) were often used as fodder for jokes in numerous movies and TV shows. Another frequently used joke was having people being caught buying, renting or browsing porn videos in video stores. (Clips from the 2004 movie “Jersey Girl” and TV shows “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” are used as some examples of porn embarrassments in video stores.)
Video stores weren’t always used as the source of mockery on screen. There’s a very good analysis of what the video store represents in the 2007 zombie apocalypse film “I Am Legend,” which was adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. “Videoheaven” points out that if “I Am Legend” took place during a time when video stores were obsolete, then that video scene would not have existed in “I Am Legend.”
What “Videoheaven” conveys very well through its meticulous assembling of clips and thoughtful narration is the significance that video stores (in their heyday) were many things to many people. Video stores could be emporiums of overwhelming entertainment choices, community gathering places, pickup joints, informal schools of pop culture, or places where kids could get access to movies they were too young to see in theaters—just to name some of the ways that people could perceive or use video stores.
And sometimes in action flicks or horror films, video stores were places for some brutal fights and showdowns. “Videoheaven” names many examples, including 1987’s “The Lost Boys,” 1988’s “Remote Control,” 1989’s “The Dead Next Door” and 1989’s “The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie.” And in 1993’s “The Last Action Hero,” Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the action movie star Jack Slater) poked fun at himself when Jack and his kid sidekick Danny Madigan (played by Austin O’Brien) go into a Blockbuster-type video store and see a display of Sylvester Stallone as the star of “Terminator 3: Judgment Day.”
The video store clerk also became a common character in movies and TV and was often stereotyped as a (1) a nerdy cinephile, who could very judgmental about customers’ choices or (2) a rude, lazy or unhelpful employee. “Videoheaven” mentions Dawson Leery of the 1998-2003 TV drama series “Dawson’s Creek” as one of the few on-screen depictions of a video store clerk as being conisistently polite and not neurotic.
Hawke gives the narration a lively and engaging tone that is more like a conversation than an academic lecture—even though much of the script is written as pop culture history lessons, with some opinions sprinkled in here and there. Hawke portrayed video store clerk Robin Buckley in the Netflix horror series “Stranger Things” (which takes place in the 1980s), so it’s inevitable that “Videoheaven” has a few “Stranger Things” clips of Robin Buckley and her video store co-worker Steve Harrington (played by Joe Deery) on the job at Family Video, the fictional video store in “Stranger Things.”
“Videoheaven” references several movies where owners or employees of video stores are the protagonists, including 1994’s “Clerks,” 2007’s “Watching the Detectives,” 2008’s “Be Kind Rewind” and 2008’s “Good Dick.” It’s noted that by the time “Be Kind Rewind” and “Good Dick” were released, video stores were a dying business. In the case of “Be Kind Rewind,” the screenplay was written long before the decline of video stores.
Before he became a filmmaker, Perry was a video store clerk at Kim’s Video, a retail chain of video stores in New York City. (A “Kim’s Video” documentary, released in 2024, captures a similar nostalgic sentiment toward the bygone era of brick-and-mortar video stores.) There was obviously a lot of passion and care that went into the research, clip compilations, and narration script for “Videoheaven.” The movie’s three-hour run time will be too exhausting for some viewers. But for viewers who want to soak up a lot of on-screen history about video stores, “Videoheaven” is an immersive ride worth taking.
