The Video Store

Rickey Bird, Jr’s The Video Store covers the events in Bakersfield as aliens return to the city to abduct more specimens for examination. As the strange sightings appear throughout the town, our story focuses on a young boy at Bird’s Movie Zone, who is staring at the video store’s only copy of Killer Vampires — “too wild for young eyes” — on VHS. Finally, the store owner warns the kid to put the movie back on the shelf because he’s too young.

Bursting through the doors comes an FBI agent with a briefcase that smoking and glowing. The agent needs to use the store’s cassette demagnetizer immediately. In all the commotion, the boy steals Killer Vampires and rushes to his best friend’s house for a viewing. The alien threat continues with a UFO crashes into the museum clock tower in the center of town.

“…aliens return to the city to abduct more specimens for examination.”

The Video Store is a wonderfully silly short film. Its humor comes from its crazy characters. Bird finds a good comedic balance between creating larger-than-life characters and never letting any of them go too far over the top into inane absurdity. I’m particularly fond of the dudes looking up UFO conspiracies in a chat forum or the video store owner, who has to call his friend about UFOs being real when the FBI shows up at his store. Let’s not forget our hero kid, who needs to watch the Killer Vampire video before looking for safety. Before I forget, there are also puppets!

In doing a little research, The Video Store is a short film that serves as the back story of an alien invasion escape room in Bakersfield. Thankfully, the short is by no means a commercial for the escape room and can stand alone on its own. But, at the same time, this must be a pretty fun escape room.