Having debuted in the UK at 2023’s FrightFest Halloween, it has taken a little while for The Last Video Store to get a release. The wait is almost over however, as the film, which also screened at this year’s Celluloid Screams, arrives on Arrow Films Blu-ray from Monday 9th December. Whilst a year might sound like a long time, the journey to create the film has taken closer to a decade and is the passion project of a group of Canadian filmmakers.
Directed by both Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford, The Last Video Store sees a collection of fictional characters brought into the real world setting of video store, Blaster Videos. It is then left to video store owner Kevin (Kevin Martin) and new customer Nyla (Yaayaa Adams) to do battle with their otherworldly visitors, which include a hockey-masked killer, an alien, and washed up action hero, Viper (Josh Lenner).
The Last Video Store taps into the nostalgia for visiting video stores and has the added bonus of the character of Kevin being played by a real-life video shop owner (yes they still exist). During our visit to Celluloid Screams, THN sat down with some of the team – Cody Kennedy, Josh Lenner and Kevin Martin – who were visiting the festival. Read on to discover all in our in-depth discussion about the project.
The Last Video Store began as a short, how did this idea go from short to feature?
KEVIN MARTIN: I opened a video store back in 2005 in my home city of Edmonton, Canada. Out of that we created a film festival in our city called Ded Fest. We decided during our monthly screenings to have local filmmaker competitions – whoever can make the best short film on a certain subject. Then Tim and Cody, along with Josh, kept showing up and submitting their shorts and won every frickin month. They were just that good. We decided we were going to have our first ever big time guest for us, and that was Michael Biehn of The Terminator and Aliens. We decided we should film something before we put him on stage, to really, really introduce him, and well, Cody you can take that…
CODY KENNEDY: So to film a little short intro, also because Josh was doing Michael Biehn impressions. Originally we were really adamant on getting access to this theatre to shoot this thing inside the theatre and then we weren’t able to. Kevin was like, “well you can use my store”. We were like, “okay, I guess we’ll use the lobby”, and then we shot this little two minute intro in there. Josh did his awesome impression. Kevin discovered, he could…
KM: I could play myself.
CK: You were awesome on screen. It screened really well. People were asking Kevin, “what are you doing next month for the Battle Royale screening?” So we decided to start making short films inside the lobby with Kevin and Josh, and some other friends, that were just riffs on whatever movie was playing. We did our own satirical version in the video store. It became our film school in a way as well, for about half a year, where every time we were trying to learn a bit more.
JOSH LENNER: For every movie that was playing in the theatre we did our own homage to it. So Army of Darkness or Battle Royale, I would always play a character from that movie, and then I was Kevin’s employee in the video store and we would have a lot of fun that way. People kept demanding more. It would hype them up for the movie. And then we started entering into a film festival…
CK: What we did was go, “okay, this small little audience at their film festival like it. What if we made a short film now that we’ve had this little film school; let’s make a short like The Last Video Store.”
KM: We were doing spoofs of movies that most people knew about, no problem. But then, we were showing Father’s Day by Astron Six, and we can’t riff on this because nobody’s seen the movie, so then it became, “why don’t we just have Josh be my fake employee, and we’ll make Netflix the bad guy,” because Netflix was killing video stores, and we called them ‘Ned Flicks’. He was a robotic gangster and he would send his thugs into the store and try to mess me up, and poor Josh would have to kill them all every time, but make sure you clean my bathroom too, that was the whole point of the short film. It’s one of my favourites. We had a great one where it was time for our big annual Film Festival again, so we did one called, “We need a mascot for the film fest” and Josh has some toxic chemicals and turns into a monster accidentally. Matt Kennedy was our guest and Matt showed up in our short film playing himself like, “nobody picked me at the airport and I come in here and I see you guys messing around this monster”. People liked that.
But the first short that really got us noticed, where we change the lighting of the video store, was the Christmas episode.
JL: Yeah, the Tree Beast.
KM: Which I believe will be on the Arrow Video release. We got Adam Brooks as narrator. We did it like Twas the night before Christmas. People really liked that one.
JL: But all the narration was made up and was about alcohol and how Kevin was fed up with Christmas, and how it was all bought by corporations.
KM: And Josh loves Christmas and he grabs the power of Christmas, and thanks to him believing, the Christmas tree became a monster and it killed us both. That was the end of our characters.
JL: It was my fault.
CK: And then we made the short film of The Last Video Store in 2013. Kevin sent it to Mitch [Davis] at Fantasia and was like, “hey, can you play this at your festival?”
KM: I had met Mitch the year before, just going over there to book movies for our festival. So I was, “how are we going to submit this short? We got to go through all the paperwork, and all that – because it’s a big Festival.” I literally sent it to Mitch personally, and within 10 minutes he messaged me back, and he goes, “yup, you’re in.”
CK: They put us before Samurai Cop, which is awesome. We had a chance to go out there and it was really inspiring because everyone’s like, “you guys should make [more].” As a group we were like, “what do we do? Should we make a web series? Can you make a feature?”, and people said, “you should make a feature film”. Then we attempted to make a feature back then with a small amount of money. It was just a bit ambitious and some random scenes that were cut and put together from that are also on the Arrow release. We ended up pivoting. We didn’t finish it. We shot a bunch of stuff, we spent two months.. At the time, I worked at a car dealership group, making marketing videos with the composer of this film who was our DoP. We kindly asked – they had an empty dealership – and we asked “can we borrow the dealership?” They gave us the keys to this empty dealership and we built it like a video store set in there. We spent two months filming, what would have initially been the first 10 minutes of this movie and just learned a lot. We had some random scenes.
JL: There’s also the yurt.
CK: Yeah we built a yurt out of VHS tapes in the backyard. The neighbours definitely hated us.
JL: So many tapes were sacrificed.
KM: We felt bad because we invited… he’s now a good friend of ours, but he was a guest at our festival, a gentleman named Jeremy Garner, actor, and director. Jeremy is one of the sweetest human beings. He originally was going to play the original owner of the video store that I inherited it from. My mother (in the original plot A)… the video store gets destroyed twenty minutes into the movie, and me and Josh are in the real world. But the real world is this analog world. We had this ambitious idea of a Jabba the Hutt type character called The Collector. We had to find the mythical Videonomicon book at the time, and it was just going to be way over our heads… But the idea of Jeremy Garner, his character was called Lemmy, and what happened was my mother couldn’t afford to pay the late charges for late tape, so she abandoned me at the video store as payment as a child. So he takes me in, and raised me in the video store. We had a little kid dressed as ten-year-old me doing montages of throwing rented tags. The idea was ridiculous.
CK: It was a crazy chapter.
JL: Initially before Jeremy, we were trying to get Michael Biehn.
CK: Yeah, there was no way he was going to come out for that. He thought our short was cool, but that wasn’t going to happen.
JL: He was like, “oh that’s really nice of you guys, that’s really cool. No”.
(All Laugh)
CK: We pivoted. There was a company called –
KM: You’re skipping something. They had the ABCs of Death 2 competition where they left one letter open, which was the letter M. So we did M is for Magnetic Tape. We didn’t get the win, but we were good enough that we were a part of ABCs of Death 2.5.
CK: Then we essentially pivoted to a competition for creating a web series. So we tried to make a web series out of the idea. We had the idea where Kevin would put in some type of cursed tape and get sucked into the TV and he would experience b-movies. So every episode was based around a different genre or movie. He would go through the plot and mess it up. That’s where Caster Creeley and the Prey Stalker were initially from.
JL: And Viper.
CK: Yeah, even a version of Viper. Yeah. We were able to make the whole web series. That was fun. It was hard. A couple years past, we didn’t really do anything. We didn’t give up on the dream of making a feature, everyone was working and doing different things and then I think jump three years from there and Kevin was…
KM: Struggling. My store was really struggling, and I knew the guys were going to be in town for a bit. So I’m like, “hey Code, think maybe we could film a commercial for my video store and get it on social media? Maybe it’ll help business a little bit.”
CK: Yeah, it’ll be fun to get the band back together.
KM: So we shot The Video Store commercial. But the problem is, instead of actually helping my store and getting it out the Internet as soon as possible, Cody’s like, “I think we made it too good. I can do some tinkering.”
CK: And we turned it into an actual short film about making a commercial in a video store.
KM: We started touring it in festivals, not helping promote the store (laughs).
CK: Here’s the story. We made it and put it together, added a little more to it and then I gave it to Greg [Jeffs], the producer. We sent it to Greg and were like, “maybe a festival might play this?” and he said we should submit it to a bunch of things and maybe we could get finance. He was really pushing us, and we’d kinda given up on doing a feature at that point but we said, “sure, we’ll submit it,” and then X months later, SXSW were, “hey, we want to play your movie on the midnight genre block.” Tim and I were able to go out there and that was a cool experience. Based on that, we were able to get the ball rolling again for a feature. We went into the Frontières Market, put a script together, took bits and pieces of the last decade, and smashed them together. We saw where we’d made mistakes with the first attempt – let’s keep this all inside the video store. We’d spent so much time making short films that were just based in the video store. I think we could probably make something that is the single location and try to make little set pieces within the video store.
JL: Very simple, but effective.
KM: It was a tough pitch, because it wasn’t a normal year for the Frontières Market. Because usually, you’d go there, you’d be on stage and do your pitch, and then you have the whole week there to meet people, but it was the pandemic. So the guys flew into my city and we did it all from the video store on Zoom. It was like speed dating, but trying to get your film made. It was 6:00 in the morning, our time, and every half an hour we’re talking to somebody different. And of course, since it was the pandemic, everyone had fake backdrops on their Zoom, so everybody thought the video store backdrop was fake. Not knowing that we’re actually sitting in the video store. They were like, “oh that’s a great backdrop”, and I was, “this is the real story guys.” It was two whole days of pitching. The guys went back to Vancouver and we didn’t hear anything for a couple of months. Then you guys let me know around Christmas.
CK: Yeah, it was Blue Finch, the UK Sales agent. They really liked the short films, and specifically Mike from there, was such a cool guy and he said, “I really like what you guys are doing. Let’s try to help you make this movie”. So they came on early to help us through that, which basically motivated us to continue working on the script, getting that finished. Then we were looking at different avenues for funding and then we were able to eventually get funding in Canada, which required us to basically shoot it in Eastern Canada and Hamilton, which is the opposite of where we all live. It just happened really quick. A bunch of props in the film, we had to design them, 3D print them, and then these guys were building the set, so we had this crazy short prep time. That’s a lot of story. We gave you everything.
So Kevin, how much of yourself is in Kevin?
KM: I’d say 80% realistically.
JL: That’s why he’s so likeable.
KM: In the movie where I’m pitching these movies to Nyla, who hasn’t watched them, and I’m giving her the plot descriptions, my customers know that’s me.
CK: We’ve all experienced that.
KM: I don’t live in my video store in real life, so that’s a good thing. If I lived there I’d look like the dude from Big Lebowski; just wear my house robe and let people in. My cats would be store cats. But yeah about 80% is me. The bedroom where I’m explaining to her, “I used to get paid to talk movies and people stopped coming”, luckily, people are coming again because they’re getting sick of too many streaming sites these days. It’s an exaggerated version of me, but it’s not far from the truth.
Do you think that the tide is turning on streaming services? There are so many that it’s become like cable again. Do you think people are pivoting back to physical media?
CK: It’s really funny that even back in 2012 we were like, “Netflix is our enemy of the video store,” and we didn’t know how long we could play with that thread. Now we’re a decade later, it has become this big monster since then.
KM: There are so many streaming sites now, they might as well bundle them into a package and call it cable. We’re going full circle. The one thing in real life I always tell my customers – you flip through your streaming site for 45 minutes trying to pick something to watch. You click on something and then turn it off because you’re not into it and you say, “I’ll get back to it.” The reality is you’ll never come back to watching whatever it was. Whereas you take the time to go to a video store with friends, chat with the guy that runs the video store, look at the covers, you might have picked, let’s say some of the crappiest movies of all time to take home. But you’re going to watch all three of those movies because you made the effort, and then you want to come back and tell me how much it sucked, or how great it was. There’s something sociable and communal about being able to talk with fellow nerds. It’s like coming to this film festival; we all have something in common.
I thought my store was going to go out of business during the pandemic – the exact opposite happened. I couldn’t let people in for a couple months, but they would message me and I’d meet them outside the door with the movies. But when I could open up, but everything else was still closed like bars, people used my store as an excuse to do something outside of the house for 20 minutes. I could only let two people in at a time, but they’re like, “oh my God, I can talk to a human being that isn’t my kids or my husband or my wife, let’s nerd out for a bit”. I know this sounds terrible saying it, but the pandemic, it was good times for the video store.
JL: Because it’s a sense of escaping. Streaming, it’s convenient. But there’s something about physical media that makes it almost like a reward. You get that rush of excitement when you hold it in your hands and you’re able to plug it into a machine. I think that’s certain to come back a little bit more.
KM: The biggest disservice to this movie, it would have been criminal if this movie made about physical media was only available on streaming. That would have been the sad irony.
There is so much material that you could have mined from to create the films within the film. How did you narrow it down to the three, because I guess there was a route where it was three sci-fi, three action movies, three horrors. How did you whittle it down?
CK: It was a collective of all the genres we related to growing up, things we would rent in the video store. Our Beaver Lake being the slasher character, the love of those films and Prey Stalker is just all of that sci-fi filtered into it, and then the action hero. We felt those were the three genres that were ideal for the video store culture. We talked about puppets actually at one point – how could we do fun puppets and all those things? But we ended with these three. It felt like any of those leftover ideas we could definitely visit in a TV show or a sequel because there’s definitely tons on the cutting room floor when it came to other genres.
KM: I mean in a weird way, if you’ve seen the web series Straight-to-Video, a lot of it was taken from that. That was the birth of all them. The more I think about it, the way the movie ends, it almost feels like a prequel to the web series now.
CK: It could almost be the first episode of the web series.
Josh, who was your inspiration for Viper? I know he’s a pastiche of a lot of action heroes, but who was the one that you were focussing on?
JL: I grew up loving Jean-Claude Van Damme, to the point where there would be training montages in my everyday life. Growing up with that inspiration, it would put me into martial arts and allow me to train properly so I wouldn’t hurt myself. But before the movie, Tim told me to study Steven Seagal a lot. So I watched a lot of Steven Segal, and wow, what a person, not quite a hero at all, but that’s kind of like the persona [of Viper]. Very egotistical and strong-headed and almost aggressive to a point; that kind of mentality. But there was also a sense of Chuck Norris thrown in there. So it’s kind of like a collaboration of a view, but mostly Jean-Claude Van Damme. You can kind of hear it in the movie.
CK: There’s a point where I think we watched Bloodsport everyday one summer, and quoted the entire movie. We wanted to get a track from Paul Hertzog for the montage. Our reference tracks were always his. There’s even a chunk in the 2013 Video Store where Josh gets launched into a desk and there’s a track, again it’s a Bloodsport moment.
How important was it for you to make sure that all of these characters had an arc? In the middle of Viper’s story, it’s quite tragic as he’s confronted with being the most inferior of all Action Jackon’s characters.
JL: The worst of the worst.
CK: It was really important to play these guys straight and we wanted to give them the arc. We gave Caster an arc.
JL: Tell her the original idea.
CK: The original version, which we had to cut budgetarily, was that Viper was actually pulling other versions of himself out of different movies and fighting them…
JL: And killing them, to prove he was the best.
CK: So then when Kevin woke up there would have been a pile of Vipers that he was sitting on top of because his ego couldn’t handle being the inferior one. So we went really deep, we wanted that to be quite intense. For us it was fun to lean into “what would Vipers arc look like?” This is what would maybe break him and maybe make him into a good villain. We always liked the idea of the slasher killer being… Jason, his backstory is so sad, he’s this killer, but maybe there’s a way to turn him into the good guy. We have plotted out a version of what happens with Kevin and Caster in the video world. There’s an arc for Casters that we have of him learning not to rip people’s faces off.
KM: If we could have kept it going, it was going to be a TV show. Now me and Caster are buddies together, but as we jump through more movies, the gang gets bigger. We were going to get a female from a romantic comedy movie that we fall into. Caster kills everyone at the wedding, he can’t help himself. But she comes with us and then we all bond…
CK: She’s like, “I was in this dumb rom com, now I cannot be something else”. We had these really long arcs for these guys, that we felt was quite important to play with these character tropes and flip them.
KM: It’s still a possibility if someone wants to fund it… I guess I’m supposed to represent video stores in general.
CK: Yaayaa, she was bringing the audience into that world and was able to find a little bit of love for it at the end.
KM: We flew her into my city where the real store is the movie screening there last year, to a sold out crowd. She got to walk into the real store, my store. She’s walking down those stairs and she’s like, “I feel like I’m on a movie set again”, because it looks very similar. She was just, “I get it now”, that was kind of cool.
The look and the score, because they are equally important at conjuring the nostalgic vibe of visiting the video store, I especially love the inclusion of Bolero.
CK: So Bolero, the track I felt is this big romantic piece, and Kevin’s talking about these movies and that always felt like that was his theme of the love for the movies.
KM: Every time that music kicks in, I’m about to go on a tangent right now.
CK: We really needed to get that track in because I love the song and it just meshed, it just felt like that was the perfect marriage of expressing his love for these movies. Brandon who composed the music for the movie, he originally was the DoP and a part of our group for all of the short films. He’s also into music as well. He wasn’t able to be on the shoot as he had just had his first child. We were shooting this in Ontario and just the way everything worked out, he wasn’t able to do that role. So we were in post and we were trying to figure out the music…
JL: And we didn’t have any money left.
CK: We had zero money and things weren’t quite working out, and he was, “hey guys, I can make music”. For him it was a way to be a part of the project. He’s been with us for the last decade, so he knows how to approach it.
And for the look, every section we wanted to approach with a unique feel of the lighting. We knew we were going to be in the location for the entire film, so it’s important to try and give each film a distinct look to also give it a visual interest; the green for Preystalker, the blue and a bit of orange for Josh. With some of the camera language we wanted to match those films as well, but then we also had an overarching camera language for the whole thing. So there’s definitely a lot of planning of how we’re going to approach a sequence.
Arrow is releasing The Last Video Store, what special features can people expect?
CK: I think it’s going to be pretty rad. For us, we’re excited because there’s a commentary track – we don’t have a commentary track on the film – but there’s a commentary track, and we’re excited to listen to it and see what people talk about. There’s going to be a booklet with some essays that we’re also very excited to see. We have no idea what they’re going to be, but we feel like it’s going to be pretty rad. We have a ton of behind-the-scenes footage that was taken, so I know they created a bunch of behind the scenes features.
KM: I believe there are some of our short films on there, including the 2013 Last Video Store short; Tree Beast is on there, you have M is for Magnetic Tape, and Video Store Commercial.
CK: I created a bunch of pre-vis of the scenes in Unreal Engine because that’s part of what I do during the day. There’s a bunch of random stuff that we had created to help us try to make the film that is going to be on there as well. There’s some old scenes from our first attempt at making the feature in 2013, so you can see different versions of these guys. So there’s a lot of fun extras on the disc. It’s packed. You get to see footage of them painting the sets…
KM: Riveting stuff right there.
The Last Video Store is released on Blu-ray via Arrow Films on Monday 9th December 2024.
