I ended up watching The Last Video Store for no other reason than the fact that I confused it with an identically-titled horror film that came out the very same year. Rather than watching the horror film I was hoping for,
The Last Video Store is rife with overly artificial and tacky dialogue, non-sequitur gags, long periods of awkward silence relying on the soundtrack to fill the empty space, outdated character stereotypes and a complete absence of anything genuinely funny.
For a movie reliant entirely on people talking instead of things actually, you know, happening, an abundance of punishingly dull dialogue between awkward and unlikable characters. This movie comes across as Clerks fan-fiction that doesn't have a clear realisation as to why Kevin Smith's movie worked. His movie was funny, the conversations were interesting and the characters were believable, and none of that is present here.
The cast give it their best efforts but their performances come across as very amateur, the lines they're handed aren't ever funny and director Brian Vining seems unwilling to acknowledge these limitations, instead insisting on letting conversations and takes linger on for excessively long periods of time. The "story", if you could call it that, slags along without a particularly likeable protagonist. In fact, it's hard to find a particularly likeable character in the film. All in all, I got one hour through the movie before I realised that I'd just confused it with another movie and then switched it off.
This film was clearly a labour of love made with the best intentions, but I felt no love for it and it did not achieve the best results. It's a credit to the filmmakers that they got this movie made, but they just didn't find enough material to wring out of the single-location setting or to go beyond overused romantic comedy cliches when the chance for more commentary on changing times and the deterioration of the old fashioned video store was right there.
