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Since COVID hit, cinemas have struggled to fill their schedules with new releases alone, and movie theaters have had to get creative to bring in crowds. Every one, it seems, is doing something a little different. The Hollywood has Kung Fu Theater; Cinema 21 is packing people in for brunch-time classics; Tomorrow Theater is inviting knitters to lights-on screenings. Cinemagic has theme nights. Current nights include Holiday Horrors (on Saturday, you can check out the 1981 slasher flick My Bloody Valentine) and Cinema City (a celebration of ’80s and ’90s Hong Kong cinema).
But one theme night in particular warms my heart: VHS Night. These are not, as Cinemagic’s website warns us, “the finest rental store staples of the ’80s and ’90s.” VHS Night is a celebration of schlock—movies either released directly to video or that had very brief theatrical runs.
Ryan Frakes and Nicholas Kuechler bought Cinemagic in 2021, but the concept for VHS Night was born a bit earlier. In 2020, Frakes and his friends started watching direct-to-video movies together over Zoom, an event they dubbed Quaranscreen.
“We kind of got sucked into only watching really bad movies until we found each hidden gem,” Frakes tells WW.
Once he took possession of the theater, he got a VCR hooked up to the projector and thought it would be fun to start showing VHS movies—many of them unavailable in any other medium—on the big screen. Featured films have included such improbable titles as Santa With Muscles, Maniac Cop 2 and Brainsmasher…A Love Story. Curating the event requires a tremendous amount of research, Frakes says; it takes work to find a movie that’s bad in a way that’s interesting and can hold an audience’s attention. Sourcing tapes is also work; he gets them online, at Antique Alley and Memory Den, and through local VHS swaps. The event has also drawn a crowd of regulars who come in “excited and down for whatever we’ve planned for that evening,” Frakes says. “They’re very enthusiastic and ready to have a good time.”
