This took me way too long to see, and wow- it’s perfect.

Kevin (Kevin Martin) runs Video Blaster, a rental store whose clientele is slowly dying off. One of his best customers, in fact, has just died, and his daughter Nyla (Yaayaa Adams) has come to drop off his last rentals and find out exactly what the strange black and red glowing VHS her father had is all about.

Then things get crazy.

Directed by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford (who wrote the script with Joshua Roach), this has that cursed tape—The Videonomicon—reanimating the rentals of Nyla’s father: a movie starring action hero Jackson Viper (Josh Lenner), one of the many Castor Creeley (Leland Tilden) Beaver Lake Massacre slasher sequels and an early 90s CGI Predator rip-off. Now, the store is as deadly as so many of the movies inside it and cut off from the outside world.

Steven Kostanski from Astron-6 did the effects. Martin used to run an actual video store, and this starts with a fake Italian movie that I wish I could watch. It is based on The Lobby DVD Shop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. There are movies with titles like Preystalker and Warpgate in this, and yes, I would watch both of those, too.

At one point, Kevin says, “I used to get paid to talk about movies with people, but then they stopped coming.” Anyone who regularly visits this site will feel so much of this movie. If you can name more than ten Empire Pictures movies, they pretty much made this movie for you.

The Arrow Video blu ray release of this film has extras including commentary by film critics Matt Donato and Meagan Navarro; a new visual essay by film critic Heather Wixson co-author of In Search of Darkness; a new visual essay by film critic Martyn Pedlar; several short films by Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford; clips from the first attempt at making this, behind-the-scenes videos; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics Anton Bitel and Alexandra West; a reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by John Pearson and a double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly commissioned artwork by John Pearson.

You can buy it from MVD.