Video Haven Review – Alex Ross Perry’s Three-Hour Ode to the Video Store

Alex Ross Perry rewinds time with Video Haven, a nearly three-hour deep dive into the cultural legacy of the video store.

Video Haven Review – Alex Ross Perry’s Ode to the Video Store

⭐️⭐️⭐️½ out of 5

There’s something sacred about walking into a local theater that still dares to program films outside the mainstream. For me, the latest reminder came courtesy of Video Haven, Alex Ross Perry’s nearly three-hour documentary on the rise, fall, and memory of the video store—narrated by Maya Hawke.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 53 minutes, Perry’s film is as exhaustive as it is engrossing. It digs deep into how video rental stores became the heartbeat of neighborhoods, from the scrappy mom-and-pop shops to the looming franchises that shaped entire generations of film lovers. For anyone born between 1970 and 1985, this doc hits especially hard. It’s nostalgia with bite.

The Power of the Video Store

The documentary captures how video stores were more than retail—they were cultural hubs. They offered free rentals for kids with good report cards, aisles that mixed Toxic Avenger posters with Disney tapes, and late-night sections that pushed boundaries. Perry shows us how clerks became cinephile gatekeepers, how horror kept the shelves alive, and how VHS tapes—those black bricks with handwritten labels—became artifacts of a true middle-class America.

And yet, as informative as Video Haven is, it occasionally misses the mark. Perry highlights the white clerks-turned-Hollywood stories and the pop-cultural nostalgia (Clerks, Be Kind Rewind, Hamlet wandering Blockbuster aisles) but largely sidesteps other perspectives. Bootlegging culture, which was pivotal in communities of color, is ignored. The Japanese influence on VHS technology and aesthetics gets barely a nod. For a film so detail-driven, this absence feels like a blind spot—especially when considering how horror, porn, and underground tapes thrived because of those overlooked markets.

The Emotional Pull

Even with its length, I couldn’t look away. Perry’s approach taps into why these places mattered. For me, it hit home—I still remember Hollywood Video on Manchester in Webster Groves. I was 14, homebound with mono, and decided to rent every horror title from A to Z over two weeks. That wall of horror DVDs and VHSs changed my life. Without it, I wouldn’t be writing film criticism today.

Watching Video Haven reminded me of those moments. It made me want to repurchase a VHS player, to walk the aisles of a store that no longer exists, to feel the texture of film culture before streaming flattened it all into algorithms.

Final Thoughts

Could this doc have worked at 90 minutes? Probably. Would it still hold the same weight? Maybe not. Perry’s sprawling runtime mirrors the overwhelming abundance of the video store itself—you stayed too long, rented too much, and left with more than you needed.

Video Haven is imperfect, occasionally too whitewashed, but deeply moving. A 3.5 out of 5 that earns its tears, and its rewatches. For anyone who lived through VHS—or wishes they had—this is essential viewing.