This NYC Video Store Has Free Rentals Of Rare VHS And DVD Titles

Remember when the epitome of Friday night cool was perusing the shelves of VHS tapes or DVD discs at your local video rental store? From the late 1970s, when VHS first hit the U.S. market, to the late 2000s when streaming took over, physical media played a huge part in shaping global culture. One of New York City's most legendary video rental houses was Kim's Video and Music, which opened in 1987 in the East Village and rented out everything from art films to adult titles. When VHS consumption plunged, the last Kim's store closed in 2014. But while Google may still list it as "permanently closed," Kim's has found new life. 

Now housed in the basement of Lower Manhattan's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the collection has been reborn as Kim's Video Underground. Visitors can browse — and borrow — 15,000 restored titles and counting, from blockbusters and deep cuts to rare niche genres, low-budget Troma films, and titles that don't exist on streaming. Five-day rentals are free. Alamo Drafthouse also features a monthly Kim's Video Presents series on the big screen. And since owning a VHS or DVD player is no longer common, Kim's rents those out, too, for $20.

Originally, Youngman Kim established his store in a laundromat, then quickly expanded to a small chain that housed roughly 55,000 pieces of media, including obscure, hard-to-find, limited-run titles. Mondo Kim's, a three-story behemoth of ultra-categorized media, was its flagship. After closing his shops, Kim sold the collection to a company in Italy, where it remained in storage for years before returning to New York City in the early 2020s. Today, several original employees are working to restore the world-traveled collection. Whether you're waiting out bad weather that cancels NYC's outdoor activities or simply want to curl up with a cult classic, Kim's Video Underground is a must-visit.

Getting to Kim's Video Underground on Liberty Street is fairly easy, even if it's via the chaotic New York City subway system. Simply take the downtown subway lines or the A or C trains from Brooklyn. Once inside, comb through thousands of titillating titles, from "Kid-Show Hostess Xuxa in Love Strange Love" and "Paganini Horror" to obscure, direct-to-video or made-for-cable movies, music and experimental genres, funky animation either gone from circulation or totally unsearchable, and "an improbably dense" selection of queer and documentary films, according to filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who co-curates the Kim's Video Underground collection. (He also points to the impressive horror section — a must in any video store.) Much of the obscurity of these titles stems from murky distribution rights — and yes, there are plenty of bootlegs in the collection.

Physical media is returning to the zeitgeist, led by Gen Zers who are "discovering" analog, much the way Millennials "discovered" vinyl records in the 2010s. The novelty of owning vintage media, digital fatigue, streaming costs, and desire for control have incentivized new generations to embrace retro artifacts — CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, and even audio cassettes are making a comeback. There are also a growing number of shrines to physical media: The last Blockbuster store, now a tourist attraction in Bend, Oregon, and Vidiots in Los Angeles, with a small VHS and DVD rental store attached to its indie theatre, attract film purists, movie buffs, and the history-curious alike. Oregon is also home to Movie Madness, a video store and movie props museum — a bonus, since these video stores stand as living museums on their own. Kim's Video Underground is no exception: like its host cinema, the Alamo Drafthouse, it's meant to be a lived, moviegoing experience.