‘VHS is, you know, it’s like vinyl – if vinyl kinda sucked,’ says director Michael Keene in the keynote speech of Rob Preciado’s wide-ranging documentary about a) the era of VHS (nobody mentions Betamax), which in America came a little after it did in the UK, and b) the amiable eccentrics who hoover up old (but playable) tapes for pennies and build wall-sized collections against which they can be interviewed (I’m certainly not one to carp about that). There’s a long stretch, featuring artist Graham Humphreys and a few Brit voices, giving a precis of the video nasties kerfuffle – but it refreshingly takes in voices from Mexico, Australia, Holland and other countries, chronicling the arrival of homevideo, timeshift recording, under-the-counter bootlegs, Mom n Pop stores and Blockbuster (viewed now with nostalgia rather than the corporate plague that wiped out interesting indie stores). Interviews are spiced up with PD clips (fuzzy, of course) and a wealth of vintage ad material about the equipment and the tapes. Relatively breezy.
