Cheap DVDs, torrenting and streamers looked to have killed off video rentals. But a group of cinephile shop owners are keeping the flame alive
A man shuffles along a royal blue carpet and props himself up against a stacked shelf of videos. Reeling off a list of films, he is handed three store-branded DVD cases. In return? A crisp fiver – plus his thoughts on South Korean horror flicks without any dialogue. This isn’t a sepia-tinged flashback from the past. Nor is it all just a dream. It is 2024 and the transaction is taking place at Snips Movies, one of the UK’s last video rental stores, tucked away in a town in Wirral since 1995. The odd passerby does a double take, staring back at the shop’s welly-green facade to confirm its reality.
Snips’ owner, Dave Wain, is part of a small cast of movie mavericks refusing to let video rental fade to black. Alongside Snips, just two other original video rental stores still stand. There’s TVL Allstar Video in Haverhill, opened in 1984, a detached brick video and print shop that’s barely changed in the last 40 years. Then there’s 20th Century Flicks in Bristol, which manager Dave Taylor says began as a “slightly piratical enterprise knocking out dubious copies of ET”, and has a focus on queer and arthouse cinema. Another, For Your Eyes Only in Forest Hill, south London, survived until November last year. A few months earlier, a parked car rolled down a hill and smashed through the shop window. Stranger Still, this literal block-buster was also a sequel – the exact same thing had happened before. A local fundraiser tried to save the business, but the damage had been done and owner Gulam Charania was forced to close after 25 years.
