Rewinding to the Age of VHS, in All Its Grainy, Clunky Glory

If you’re at a garage sale, and you see a VHS tape of a McDonald’s training video, drop what you’re doing and call Mitsu Okubo.

Okubo is a VHS collector and co-founder of Basement VHS, a loose-knit collective that’s amassed a stockpile of more than 3,000 VHS tapes in a Mission District basement. And like most collectors, Okubo has a white whale.

“There’s a lot of McDonald’s employee training tapes out there, but there’s this one in particular, released to address the tragedy of 9/11 that was exclusively shown to their employees,” Okubo says, covetously. “It’s literally a Ronald McDonald, like, ‘This is how we deal with the tragedy of 9/11 with our employees and customers.’”

Why would anyone seek such a bizarre cultural artifact? Helpfully, there’s an explanation: The Basement Tapes, a full-color, 352-page book chock-full of the most perplexing titles from the Basement VHS collection, edited by Okubo and his Basement VHS co-conspirator Luca Antonucci. The book’s release is celebrated with a day of movie screenings at the 4 Star Theater on Saturday, Aug. 30.

This all-analog crew of VHS enthusiasts has been adjusting their tracking together since 2011 and discussing movies each week on Radio Valencia since 2023. At weekly screenings each Wednesday, they invite others to the Basement, where piles of videotapes tower above fuzzy, grainy — or, ahem, “warm” — screenings of arcane non-blockbusters like Frankenhooker, C.H.U.D. and The People Under the Stairs.

Not only are the movies typically so-bad-they’re-good-and-wait-a-sec-actually-they-might-just-be-great, the medium defies the dominant notion that streaming is something to be embraced. “Entertainment should require a certain level of inconvenience,” Okubo writes in a foreword for the book, noting that not long ago, “entertainment was an event we had to wait for, adding anticipation and value to the experience.”

Plus, in a city hypnotized by individualism and the ceaseless charge of technology, gathering with others to watch movies on VHS amounts to a subversive act. Spencer Kerber, a 32-year-old computer systems analyst, started coming to Basement VHS nights after he moved to San Francisco three years ago.

“They have searched and scavenged across the world to build this crazy video archive that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Kerber says of Basement VHS. “Their love for film and accidental finds can’t be replaced by some abstracted algorithm-powered streaming service.”

Those accidental finds are perhaps the most intriguing inclusions in The Basement Tapes, which presents their front and back covers, price tags and video-rental stickers intact.

Tree Stand Safety shows a hapless man falling upside-down from a tree, clearly having failed to watch the video within. A white-haired elderly woman smiles from the cover of Celebration of Jackets, which promises “True sewing excitement!” Instantly intriguing titles like Santa Claus Defeats the Aliens, How to Have Cybersex on the Internet and Turkish Star Wars are included throughout.

It’s that sort of cultural short-circuitry which’ll be on full display Saturday at the 4 Star, where Basement VHS has hosted screenings (yes, projected from a VCR) for the past year. Between the films Demons 2 (1986), From Beyond (1986) and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991), shorter oddities will be screened, Risographed film stills and handmade T-shirts will be sold, and like-minded weirdos will get to commune over their love of trashy American detritus and half-inch magnetic tape.

And even though the movies aren’t well known, Okubo says, “It’ll still have this sort of like wow factor, because they are so bizarre and over the top. And still on VHS, with the grain and the glow.”

Basement VHS screens the movies ‘Demons 2,’ ‘From Beyond’ and ‘Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky,’ interspersed with 1980s and 1990s oddities and music by Beau Wanzer, at the 4 Star Theater (2200 Clement St., San Francisco) on Saturday, Aug. 30. Tickets and details here.