WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — As video stores were shuttering in the mid-2010s, Chico Eastridge and his friends began buying up VHS tapes for cheap, always with an eye for the strangest films they could find.
“VHS tapes were so ubiquitous, you could build your house out of them, and so it was sort of neat when you saw a movie you’d never heard of before,” he said.
He and his friends batted around the idea of opening a pop-up store where “people can relive going to the video store except all the movies are weird,” Eastridge, 39, said.
Now they can at Videostop II, a pop-up video store in the back of JAM (Junction Arts and Media), a public-access television station and resource center where Eastridge works in White River Junction.
At the store, named for the small chain that once populated Upper Valley towns including Hanover and West Lebanon, visitors can rent tapes for free for up to a week. Should someone need the requisite VCR, the store has a few to loan out.
Taking a trip to Videostop II, which opened in December, is like visiting a video store where everything is just “a little bit off,” as Eastridge put it.
The tapes on display are not Disney films or box office hits, but B-movies arranged into such categories as “Violent Women,” “Comedy?” and “Goo.”
Even the snacks are a little odd. There’s the classic popcorn machine, in this case a mini version that fits on the counter, but in lieu of Reese’s and Milk Duds there are rows of Abba-Zaba bars, a firm vanilla taffy with a peanut butter center, and Strawberry Smoothie Cow Tales.
Other elements of Videostop II reveal Eastridge’s fierce dedication to the aesthetics of video stores of yore. Perusing the pop-up’s long shelves, it’s hard to believe the store is part cardboard, or that it will all be gone in five weeks’ time.
The floor is lined with tacky gray carpet, and the low ceiling is constructed from pockmarked panels that Eastridge assembled just for the pop-up.
He even had a polo shirt monogrammed with the Videostop II logo, which he based on the logo from the original chain.
Eastridge, a Thetford native, remembers spending hours at Videostop, mainly the one in Hanover, where his friends worked.
Video stores were a social space as much as they were a place to pick up the latest blockbuster.
A trip to the video store was “what you would do on a Friday night,” Eastridge said. “You would peruse, you would argue about what movie you were going to watch, and inevitably you would pick the worst possible choice.”
Streaming services have created a bottomless well of movies and TV shows to choose from, but there was a certain charm to having one’s options predicated on a video store’s stock, Eastridge said. If the movie you were hoping for wasn’t available, you were forced to pivot, and perhaps discover something new.
“We’ve gained a lot, but we’ve lost a lot, Eastridge said. “There’s something about limits that really makes something kind of special.”
As of Monday, there had been 100 distinct rentals at Videostop II, with some repeats.
On Monday afternoon, I left the store with a VHS player, a boxy TV and two tapes: “Shock Treatment,” the follow-up to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and “Frankenhooker,” a 1990 horror comedy about a mad scientist who sets about reassembling his girlfriend using the body parts of sex workers after she was shredded to pieces by a rogue lawnmower.
The next evening, after some troubleshooting and a little help from the good Samaritans on Reddit.com, my housemate and I settled in to watch “Frankenhooker.”
The media theorist Marshall McLuhan is known for coining the aphorism “The medium is the message.” Indeed, watching “Frankenhooker” on VHS, with fussy sound and strips of static skipping across the screen, seemed like the only way to experience a film in which the severed body parts looked like plastic appendages stolen from a department store mannequin and blood resembled strawberry jam.
Streaming such a film on Netflix or HBO Max would have been too sterile a platform for such campy gore.
Perhaps that’s the role that VHS tapes, and the stores that lend them, could play these days: a wacky, imperfect form for wacky, imperfect films.
As for what Eastridge thinks of his creation: “The whole thing is stupid. But you know, sometimes you just do stuff that’s stupid.”
Paintings in Lyme
“Gerber and Gorman: Paintings,” a two person show by artists Greg Gorman and Jean Gerber, is on view at Matt Brown Fine Art in Lyme through Feb. 28. To learn more, go to mbrownfa.com.
Photos in Norwich
“Colors of the Coral Reef and Its Inhabitants,” an exhibition of 50 photographs by artist Ellen Jonsson, is on view at the Norwich Public Library through Feb. 27. The photos were taken during Jonsson’s scuba diving excursions in the Caribbean in the ’80 and ’90s. For more information, go to norwichlibrary.org.
