Mike’s Movies and the Underground Cinema Experience

In the early 2000s, Boston’s South End was home to a quaint beacon of cinematic taste: Mike’s Movies. More than a rental store, it was a curated temple of cult cinema, run by film lovers who hand-picked each tape and DVD. Walking through the door of Mike’s Movies felt like stepping into a private library of forbidden and forgotten films. The walls were packed with thousands of titles – from hard-to-find foreign classics to niche horror and outlaw documentaries – each one a promise of a new cinematic adventure.

Imagine a Saturday afternoon in 2004. You step off the T and wander down Tremont Street, caught by the faint glow of the “ENTER” sign on Mike’s Movies

. Inside, a bell tinkles. A friendly voice asks if you need help, and a catalog card falls open in your lap. Every wall is a visual feast of color and imagery – Crime of Passion towering over Salò, next to stacks of 1980s horror classics, dusty foreign art-house and wild comedies. The owner (always “Mike” himself, or his partner Stephen) would pop up from the back and recommend titles, often pulling out offbeat gems from the shelves. It felt like being let into a film-lover’s secrets.

Mike’s Movies had opened under a different name in the mid-1980s, but under Matrullo and Syta it truly flourished. By the late 1990s and early 2000s it was a South End institution. The Boston Globe once photographed Mike’s as “the place to be seen” on any given weekend. At its peak, Mike’s had eight employees stocking a collection of over 10,000 films. (They even ran another branch on Cambridge Street in Beacon Hill, which was still going strong a few years ago.) The store was known for its encyclopedic foreign section, a massive cult and camp corner, and – famously – “the biggest legit gay section anywhere in New England,” as Mike boasted.

Even though Mike’s ultimately closed in 2008 (victim of Netflix and Redbox), the store is fondly mythologized by many old customers. I remember browsing those aisles myself, amused by the owner’s handwritten stickers on the shelves – notes like “Great soundtrack!” or “Very, very weird movie” tacked beneath each case. It was a form of cinematic permission: when Mike recommended a tape, it felt safe to venture into strange territory. Across the country, countless video-store veterans remember the store as a portal to endless film adventures. In my own case, those visits to Mike’s or similar shops taught me to embrace offbeat films I never would have tried otherwise.

In those early 2000s video stores, VHS and DVD coexisted on the shelves. VHS was still dominant in the late '90s and very early '00s, but the shiny new DVDs had arrived. (Mike’s sold both – in fact, when the store was selling off its inventory in 2008 they famously offered $2 VHS tapes and $2–3 DVDs in bulk.) The formats themselves shaped the vibe. A VHS tape was large and boxy, encased in hard plastic with garish cover art – a physical object that smelled faintly of petroleum and magnetic tape. DVDs, in contrast, were sleek plastic cases with glossy art, easy and clean but with none of the mystical heft of a taped film. (One veteran remembers the “mixture of plastic and carpet” smell of a Blockbuster store fondly.) A great video store would exploit both formats: DVDs for the glossy reissues and top titles, and VHS for “last generation” cult classics and cheap thrills.

Kafka (1991): Bureaucratic Dystopia on Video

Among Mike’s curated collection were films that mainstream rental chains almost never stocked. One of the most memorable was Kafka (1991), Steven Soderbergh’s strange blend of historical drama and surreal thriller. Ostensibly based on the writer Franz Kafka’s life, the film is really an homage to Kafka’s own tone: the plot follows an insurance clerk in 1919 Prague drawn into a labyrinthine conspiracy that eerily mirrors Kafka’s fiction. The majority of the film is shot in noirish black-and-white, punctuated by sudden bursts of color in Kafka’s fever dreams. This creates a dreamlike atmosphere – one reviewer calls it “Kafkaesque”.

At release, Kafka was largely ignored (it earned about $1.1 million on an $11 million budget). Many critics were puzzled by its tone. But in video-store years it found a devoted niche. Fans of peculiar cinema came to embrace it much as they did Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In fact, modern critics now dub Kafka a bona fide cult film. Its mix of bureaucratic dread, existential paranoia, and sudden violent spectacle makes it endlessly intriguing to rewind. To a viewer browsing Mike’s, Kafka wouldn’t come with a flashy poster or star power – just a stark cover and perhaps a handwritten shelf tag. That lack of hype only added to its allure as a hidden treasure.

Kafka on tape was all about mood and concept. Its aesthetic is deliberately Kafkaesque: endless hallways of grey file cabinets, uniformed clerks rifling paperwork, a city gripped by an unseen oppression. The film’s climax (shot in oversaturated color) confronts the viewer with the shock of otherworldly violence invading the mundane – a twist on the famous Wizard of Oz motif. To put Kafka next to typical fare was to challenge the viewer: here was something more literary, more unsettling than the Hollywood thrillers around it. Mike’s would tuck Kafka beside art-house titles and classic thrillers, signaling that a brave renter could devour it as easily as a Jurassic Park.

Subway (1985): Neon Rebellion Beneath Paris

From Soviet-style gloom to European neon chic: Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) offered a very different flavor of underground cool. This French thriller stars Christopher Lambert as Fred, a shy thief who hides out in the bowels of the Paris Métro. The plot is madcap: Fred steals a fortune in cash, dives into the subway tunnels, and stumbles upon an eccentric community of punks, musicians and outcasts living in secret among the cars. Isabelle Adjani plays a bored socialite who becomes Fred’s muse in this underworld. The movie radiates 1980s style — flashy trenchcoats, Mohawks, flashy dresses and cigarette smoke — all under the fluorescent glow of station lights.

Critics have said “Subway is all about style over substance”, and that’s not far from the truth. The narrative is thin, but the film is replete with images that will burn themselves into your brain. Watch a tape of Subway and you’ll see Christopher Lambert running through orange-lit tunnels, punk dancers erupting out of a train car, or Adjani defiantly smoking in a green party dress. In the mid-80s this was cutting-edge. By the time it reached our video rental shelves, it had already won a César (the French Oscar) for Sound, and fans of European cult cinema knew it as the film that launched Besson’s career.

On paper, Subway already had cult credentials: Lambert’s earlier film Highlander was a midnight-movie hit, and Adjani was an established French star. The soundtrack — new wave and punk tunes — sealed the deal. The film essentially is a punk-rock fairy tale under the city; one reviewer notes it tells the story of “outsiders who sacrifice everything for rock ’n’ roll”. There’s humor too; Fred’s daring escapes are cartoonish. In later years, critics say that beneath all the neon and anarchy, Subway is about friendship and rebellion, fits of youthful passion underneath a glossy sheen. It ended up being a pivotal piece of France’s “Cinéma du look” movement. 30 years on, fans say it helped define how French cinema could look cool — and it still feels like a punk love letter every time it plays on a screechy VHS player.

On the tape shelves, Subway had every ingredient to attract browsers. Its VHS box was a cartoonish poster of Lambert and the gang under neon lights, hinting at heists and romance. A casual renter at Mike’s might not have known the whole plot, but the bold colors and promise of a wild Parisian adventure stood out among bland blockbuster cases. In short, Subway embodies neon European cool: gritty yet glamorous, romantic yet anarchic, and forever drifting along in search of meaning underground.

I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987): DIY Punk Horror

Finally, we turn to the ultimate video-store discovery: I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987). This delightfully bizarre film is a poster child for DIY cult cinema. The story is simple and ridiculous: a bunch of Brooklyn teens kill a local drug dealer, dump his body in toxic waste, and – poof – he comes back as a shambling green zombie. Hijinks ensue involving punk rock concerts, goo-covered fights, and even a teenage romance subplot. The tone is bubble-gum horror comedy, equal parts Sixteen Candles and low-budget zombie movie. Literally nothing else on the shelf looked like it.

Technically, I Was a Teenage Zombie was made by amateurs on a shoestring budget, and the production values are delightfully rough. But that’s exactly why cult cinephiles love it. The VHS box art looks homemade; the special effects are clunky; the acting is charmingly over-the-top. Horror historian Peter Dendle calls it an “irreverent amateur parody of high school romance films”. It’s amusing rather than scary, but with buckets of camp and a punky soundtrack. (Fun trivia: the cast lip-syncs to songs by Violent Femmes, Los Lobos and others, so it feels like a traveling punk rock musical.) Mike’s Movies would have shelved it under “Horror/Comedy”, and dedicated fans might have discovered it by leafing through that rack late on a slow Sunday.

By the late 1990s and 2000s, I Was a Teenage Zombie had achieved true underground status. The VHS fell out of print and became collectible. It’s listed in collector guides of rare cult DVDs, and sellers advertise it as an “underground classic”. (Original Charter Entertainment VHS and limited DVD runs traded on eBay for modest prices.) For cult buffs, finding this tape was like finding buried treasure. When the local shop closed, I remember getting Teenage Zombie for a few bucks in a final bargain box – it felt like a victory for the little guy.

VHS, DVDs, and the Cinema Underground

Kafka, Subway and I Was a Teenage Zombie may seem wildly different, but each was born to thrive in a video-store culture. Video stores were like boutiques or private archives: their titles were carefully curated by film lovers over time, not thrown into an algorithm. Managers kept special racks for cult classics, often guided by patron recommendations. As one video store founder puts it, the value of a rental store lies in curation, not size. Walking the aisles of a good shop was almost like wandering a used bookstore: you never knew what gem you’d find next. The very smell of a VHS – that plastic, petroleum odor as you pull it from a sleeve – was part of the ritual of discovery.

This tangibility had real benefits for fans. In the video store aisle, a teenager could accidentally bump into the classics while eyeing new releases. For example, Luc Besson’s Subway might sit two shelves down from Terminator 2, and a curious customer might pick up the earlier by accident or intrigue. Similarly, Kafka could be hidden in with arthouse or thriller sections; a film buff flipping through might stumble upon it and decide to give it a chance. Physical media gave a sense of ownership and permanence – if you had the tape in your hands, you felt a connection. Even after Netflix rose, these experiences shaped us. One collector notes that people keep VHS not because it’s rare, but because of nostalgia and the “experience of owning”. Another reminds us that the rumors of Disney clamshell tapes fetching high prices (based on Hollywood edits) show that fans still obsess over the specifics of VHS releases.

The communal aspect cannot be overstated. As Bay Windows journalist quoted customers, “with Netflix it’s harder to browse. You do run into people here”. Mike himself said he’ll miss “the community aspect of people walking to the video store and interacting with their neighbors”. It was a social event to swap recommendations in the horror aisle or argue about Criterion Blu-rays. Video shops served as impromptu film schools for many. One Popdose writer describes how hundreds of millions of Americans still own VCRs, and that “the (video tape) community is bigger than you would believe and growing”. He notes that VHS allowed viewers to see programming completely ignored by DVD or streaming, preserving weird world cinema that would otherwise vanish.

These shared rituals left lasting aesthetic marks. We learned to love films with neon light, surly punks, bureaucratic nightmares – partly because these were the images on the store shelf. We also learned to respect the medium: a scratched-up VHS taught us that presentation can be gritty and still be valuable. Ironically, in the “post-blockbuster” era video stores granted a sort of cinematic permission: “If it’s on the shelf, you can watch it,” was the unspoken rule. Those handwritten notes under Kafka or the faded stickers on Teenage Zombie were like a curator’s nod of approval. In retrospect, video shops were a bridge between strangers – a shared ritual of cinematic exploration and a handshake.

Epilogue: The Last Video Store in Our Hearts

Today, most of us browse Netflix or YouTube, but the dreams of the video store persist. Vintage movie forums, collector groups and even documentaries (like VHS Massacre) try to recapture the old thrill of discovery. Occasionally a fan will donate a rare VHS to a library archive or upload a digitized cult film online. But there’s no tactile replacement for walking into a shop like Mike’s, scanning rows of plastic boxes, and wondering “what’s that?”

Video stores like Mike’s Movies may be gone, but their legacy lives on in our tastes and habits. The vinyl-and-vintage revival shows that physical media still feels special. We hear about “Disney clamshell mania” on eBay, where collectors chased rumors of unedited original tapes. But true enthusiasts stress that collecting VHS is not hipster pose – it’s about love for the format and memories. For many of us, those shelves full of out-of-print horrors, art films, and campy oddities became part of our identity. We carry a bit of those darkened aisles whenever we stream a black-and-white thriller or pop in a boxed DVD set.

Walking out of the shuttered South End storefront for the last time, Mike and Stephen lamented the end of an era. But every time someone rewinds Kafka on tape, presses play on a DVD of Subway, or chuckles at I Was a Teenage Zombie on a bootleg file, they keep a piece of that era alive. Someday, even if streaming replaces shelves, the memory of that handwritten shelf note – the curators saying “Don’t miss this!” – will live on in how we share films with one another.

Sources: Archival articles and interviews about Mike’s Movies; contemporary film resources on Kafka, Subway, and I Was a Teenage Zombie; and essays on video-store culture and VHS nostalgia.