During the winter I received a notice on one of my social media sites that Pizza Party Massacre was being shown at Kings in downtown Raleigh. I knew nothing about the film except at the bottom it said the movie was shot on VHS. I had to see the weirdness. Director Hayden Hall (from the Philadelphia area) made a horror movie that felt like it was produced in the late ’80s and early ’90s when kids would attempt to make their own films using dad’s VHS Camcorder. The glitches and limitations of VHS became part of the texture of the tale of how poor Petey, a kid working at his dad’s pizza parlor was burned alive and reborn as pizza face. The special effects were properly cheesy for a film about cheese pizzas. I sat in the nightclub in awe and laughing away. The film just got brilliantly weirder until the end. It’s my favorite film of 2025. Afterwards I talked with Hayden about making the film. Turns out he spent years making the movie on weekends. He said the biggest issue with filming in VHS was that the camcorder batteries could no longer hold a charge, so he had to use extension cords. He couldn’t quite be as mobile. I realized that VHS was still an active media and not worth forgetting like DIVX discs. VHS Maniacs! – Volume 1 combines two documentaries from producer/director Tony Newton about the glory of the format, the movies and the stores that rented the titles.
VHS Lives!: A Schlockumentary (2017 – 144 minutes) is Tony Newton’s love letter to not merely the time of VHS, but the people who keep the format alive. The documentary opens with a reminder that before home video, you were at the mercy of TV station programmers to see older movies. This also meant certain cult titles never got aired on TV. There’s a lot of interviews with rabid collectors who do their best to keep the tapes from ending up at the landfill. David Decoteau worked in the industry. He’s got great tales of what it took to make and distribute the VHS tapes. He even remembers Beta! Josh Schafer, the editor-in-chief of Lunchmeat magazine (dedicated to VHS) is part of the fun. For a while Schafer ran the Video Vortex in the Alamo Drafthouse in Raleigh. They still rent VHS tapes there. (Photos at the end of this review). He remembers a guy who would rent VHS tapes in a door-to-door way. Others recount memories of walking into videostores to get tapes that they might not have been old enough to rent, but the clerk didn’t care. There’s even old home videos of people roaming the shelves at video stores including the time Chaplin came out. They even have a laserdisc section at one shop. Sadly there’s no footage of Dave’s Videodrome in Carrboro, NC which was the greatest shop I ever encountered. Newton also uses plenty of vintage ads and the openings to no-longer-existing video distributors tapes such as Wizard and Paragon. Collector’s show off their favorite VHS boxes. A lot of them really enjoyed renting horror movies.
VHS Lives 2: Undead Format (2017 – 111 minutes) opens with the VHS tape warning about copying. You better buy your own copy. There is talk about how VHS is having the same comeback as Vinyl for records which was true for 2017. There are indie filmmakers who have released VHS dupes of their films in the last few years. We get to meet people who are dealing with VHS. This includes a video store that had just opened up when they recorded the interview. Turns out Old Skool Video in Lincoln, Nebraska just recently closed so it had a 10-year run which is longer than most of the video stores I knew back in the ’80s & ’90s. I do appreciate that one person explains how the adult industry showed there was a market for home video that the other distributors saw there was money outside of theatrical. Horror quickly jumped into the market since their movies weren’t going to get properly broadcast on UHF channels. The interview subjects were all about renting horror films from their nearby shops.
VHS Maniacs! – Volume 1 brings together VHS Lives and VHS Lives 2: Undead Format in a way that will let you get caught up in the conversations. It’s great when everyone shares their memories of the VHS era and shows off the rare tapes in their collections. As someone who recorded shows on VHS (and Beta), collected movies on VHS and worked at a video rental store in the early ’90s, I didn’t pay attention to the time after hitting play. I was engrossed in their remembrances. The documentaries will allow you appreciate your desire to show off your old VHS tape boxes. You’ll geek out as much as the people in the documentary when they talk about tracking issues and remembering to rewind.
The Video is 1.78:1 anamorphic for both films. There are times when things look like they were shot 1.33:1 on VHS. Not sure if Newton broke out a camcorder for these interviews or did it in post. I’m imagining the VHS. The audio is Dolby Digital 2.0. Most of the film is people talking in front of their massive home video collections. Things sound fine.
Trailers include VHS Lives, VHS Lives 2, Christorpher Lee A Legacy of Horror and Terror, Latex: Fashion or Fetish and more.
Filmlandia presents VHS Maniacs! – Volume 1. Directed by Tony Newton. Screenplays by Tony Newton. Featuring Lloyd Kaufman, Cfa Weiss, Phil Anselmo, Glenn Berggoetz, Richard Chandler and Matthew Fisher. Boxset Contents: 2 movies on 2 DVDs. Rating: Unrated. Release Date: February 10, 2026.
Here’s the VHS wall at the Video Vortex inside the Alamo Drafthouse in Raleigh:
and here’s the trailer for Pizza Party Massacre.
