Oh the age of VHS. My earliest movie memories are of dubbed movies on VHS. There was "Super Fuzz," "The Last Dragon," "The Incredible Shrinking Woman," and so many more. I got to know the movies intimately because I watched them over and over. And as fond as those memories are, I would never go back to VHS. Ever. It was a cumbersome process and the quality was terrible, and it only got worse the more you watched.

"Rewind This!" is both a history lesson and a trip down memory lane. There are interviews with collectors, retailers, and movie makers. You will learn something and be embarrassed for some of the movies at the same time (they were that bad).

"Rewind This!" isn't a great documentary, but it serves a great purpose.

Josh Johnson's "Rewind This!" is a look at the rise of home video and the effect that it had on entertainment. As a member of the first generation that never knew a world without video cassettes, I could relate to some of the stuff that the interviewees say. I of course started out by watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on the newly released videos, and I always liked watching them over and over again.

Part of the pleasure in the documentary is watching the scenes from some of the movies that the featured video stores carry, such as disemboweled bodies. Sometimes my friends and I would watch scenes in slasher flicks over and over again (namely the tent scene in "Jason Goes to Hell"). Thanks to Movie Madness, I've seen some pretty obscure flicks.

"Rewind This!" prompts me to ask another question: why aren't certain movies available for home viewing? My mom often tells me about "The Gravy Train" (about some friends who hatch a robbery scheme to get rich) and Michael Apted's "Stardust" (about the rise and fall of a rock star; not to be confused with a 2007 movie with the same title). She saw both movies in the theater when they got released, but neither ever got released on VHS, and neither has gotten released on DVD. One would think that since the studios could make money by releasing them, so that would be enough of a motivation. Meanwhile, they release every stupid Tom Cruise movie.

Anyway, it's fun to watch the documentary and learn all this stuff about the medium. Truly fun stuff.

"Rewind This!" is all about the warm and fuzzy memories of VHS' reign over the home video market. And while I don't share those feelings to any great extent, this makes for a well-packaged and entertaining movie. For a while, at least. I was absorbed when it was about the early days of the format and when VHS was responsible for the video store boom and demand for variety. Not to mention the nostalgia for great home video box art. But it started to lose me during the tape-trading segment and the eventual mass complaints about digital vs. physical media. Everyone has an opinion on this, it's all doom-and-gloom and the tone shifted from amusing to awkward. Sadly, the fun never came back, and I missed that tone from the first half.

6/10