There's no denying the amount of love poured all over The Last Videostore, another goofy, affectionate Canadian homage to the pre-blockbusters VHS era. Whether it will work for you if you don't have a fondness for the era depends on your patience with scrappy, low-budget horror comedies.
It at least provides a point of view character for the uninitiated: Nyla (Yaayaa Adams), a woman who couldn't give less of a shit about the b-movies the film relies on for meaning. She's just returning a pile of overdue tapes to Blaster Video on behalf of her dad, a pile that includes as an added bonus... The Videonomicon, a spiky, lovely little sample of cool prop design.
Kevin (Kevin Martin), the enthusiastic owner of the store, fawns over each one of the movies and gives Nyla (and us) a short rundown for each: You've got a 90's cheap CGI sci-fi creature feature about a mantis-like alien that causes its victims to trip out while it eats them, a cheesy piss take on Friday the 13th where the Jason surrogate wears a hockey mask with implied beaver teeth (his name is Castor, yuk yuk yuk), and a crappy actioner with a viper-themed hero (but who has a cobra in his jacket). Bonus points for also including a Dakota-Harris-style Indiana Jones ripoff, which will eventually provide one of the film's biggest laughs.
But the Videonomicon, he doesn't recognize, and Nyla agrees to give it a spin to see what it's all about. Bad idea.
As the tape spins, it reaches out to the other tapes in Kevin has in his multi-play set up, summoning first the cheesy alien mantis monster, then the knock-off Jason to the shop. Hijinks ensue as the duo tries to survive, with a couple other fictional characters getting pulled from their movies to provide help, hindrance, additional gags and cheesy kills.
It's a good time! Directors Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford ably mimic some of the movie styles they're spoofing, including a fun training montage when an action star enters the story, garish lighting schemes, and a cool and well realised (if overly familiar at this stage) 80's-derived aesthetic. The effects are cheap, cheerful, and can get to be pretty cool, especially a mantis-fuelled CGI acid trip which I thought looked terrific.
The jokes are uneven, but they're invariably delivered with good cheer, and the pacing keeps things varied despite the very limited locations and some obvious stuffing. My main issue with the script (by co-director Tim Rutherford and Joshua Roach) is that it could stand to be a lot more clever; The film sets up situations where Kevin's extensive b-movie knowledge will save the day, but beyond one (very funny) desperate call for an ally and invoking "the power of friendship" to try and get empathy from a masked slasher, there's not a whole lot of that. Instead we get a metric shitload of eye-rolling and wide-eyed disbelief from Nyla and lots of pontificating about old movies that... honestly, are mostly off-base or a bit obvious, like a stick-in-the-mud slasher victim played by Matt Kennedy (Frankie Freako himself) - all these years, and we're still joking about thirty year olds playing teens? At least his delivery did make me laugh. And the less said about "the power of friendship" in the context of slasher tropes, the better.
So... yeah, some of the jokes land, but honestly the film succeeds more on the strength of its warmth towards its characters and setting than on the merits of its humour.
Oh, and a near perfect ending; I've talked before about how a botched finale can make a movie feel disproportionately worse than it deserves, and this is a good example that the reverse is also true.
Even if the observations on the movies they're spoofing are a bit suspect, there's a lot of clearly heartfelt passion on display, along with plenty of nods to other people sharing the same toybox. The shop floor where most of the action transcurs is not a set, it's one of the few remaining video stores in the Edmonton area (and Kevin is its actual owner!). A short by some of the folks behind the lovely Turbo Kid is repurposed (do go and look up the fake trailer for Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, it's a work of art). The Astron-6 crew is all over the place - Matt Kennedy, of course, plus Adam Brooks (hilarious, as usual) put in an appearance, Steve Konstanski provides a wonderful stop-motion final threat, and posters for their movies plaster the store.
The acting can be best described as amateurish but enthusiastic, which is fine, as it compliments the film's charm. Most of the FX are digital, but all the gore is practical - there's not a lot, but it'd be enough for an R rating. And the whole endeavour looks pretty good, if, as mentioned before, a bit clichéd.
It's a hard movie not to like, from its lovely opening crawl to a climactic ending where one of the characters cracks up. It might not have made me laugh all that much, but were my soul not a shrivelled, dusty thing, I may have smiled all the way through.
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