Review: VHS Video Cover Art: 1980s to Early 1990s

VHS Video Cover Art: 1980s to Early 1990s by Thomas Hodge
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

VHS Video Cover Art: 1980s to Early 1990s is a collection of box art from VHS tapes.

Not long ago, my wife and I watched Please Rewind, a documentary about the rise and fall of VHS and the underground culture of VHS collector and was overcome by feelings of nostalgia. Days after that, this popped up as one of my recommendations on Amazon and I splurged.

As the title indicates, this is a coffee table book of VHS cover art, two boxes per page. Most of them are for b-movies, designed to grab the rubes by their resemblance to the art of popular movie boxes. This book screams 1980s from cover to cover.

Some of the box art took me back to days of riding down to the video store and having about five minutes to pick something out before Dad was ready to head back home. I hadn't thought of Earth Star Voyager or Misfits of Science in years. Others reminded me that movies like Bikini Carwash Company and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama had life outside of late night on Showtime.

The original cover art of Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead were a couple of my favorites, since they looked like none of the 10-15 versions I'd seen before. Other boxes just reminded me how dumb 80s action movies were.

While I found the book charming for nostalgic reasons, there's really not much to it. Apart from two forewords, there's not much in the way of wordage. I think some artist profiles would have been nice. Maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon since Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction was so awesome and this one suffers by comparison.

All things considered, I'll be keeping VHS Video Cover Art on my coffee table as long as it can bear all the weight. Three out of five stars.



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