One of most incredible VHS collections hides in an SF basement

On the television screen, a woman named Adriana stands in the middle of a California desert, nothing behind her but sand and shrubs. Wearing a swimsuit and holding an automatic rifle, she aims the weapon at an unseen point in the distance and fires.

Another woman appears, introduces herself, and fires a different gun — an Uzi, I think — at nothing in particular. This routine repeats for an hour.

We’re standing in a blacklit basement, watching 1987’s “Rock n’ Roll 3: Sexy Girls, Sexy Guns” on a VHS tape, which Mitsu Okubo has gingerly loaded into California’s hardest-working VCR. 

The tape is surreal, sleazy and completely tasteless. It’s also phenomenally rare. Of the “Rock n’ Roll” titles, “Rock n’ Roll 3” is the only tape that Okubo has been able to track down. The films are so notorious that Quentin Tarantino recreated his own version for the 1997 film “Jackie Brown” (his title: “Chicks Who Love Guns”).   

The strange movie is one of more than 3,000 tapes packed into the floor-to-ceiling shelves of the Basement in the Mission District. It may be the Bay Area’s largest VHS collection, although Okubo doesn’t know for sure. He and his partner Luca Antonucci have spent the better part of a decade hunting down, curating and stewarding the tapes. 

Okubo, 40, works as an art handler by day. He’s also a working artist — one of his recent pieces caused a “preservation headache” for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Antonucci, who is 39, is the co-founder and publisher of Colpa Press, which prints limited editions with local artists.

Horror tapes make the heart of the collection. There’s classics like the “Scream” series, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Night of the Living Dead.” The B-movie selection is equally important: “Killer Condom” (exactly what it sounds like), “Silent Night, Deadly Night” (Christmas horror), “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers” and “Psychos in Love,” which Okubo describes as “‘When Harry Met Sally’s’ version of a slasher film.”

Then there are the smut parodies: “Beaverly Hills Cop,” “Foreskin Gump,” “Edward Penishands” and “Wet Dream on Elm Street.”

There are seven copies of the film “Seven,” two copies of … “Twins.” Antonucci and Okubo refer to a tall stack of films that take place in San Francisco as the “Transamerica building.”

But the real gems of the collection are what Okubo calls “ethnographic films.”

These are tapes with titles like “How to Yo-Yo,” “Tree Stand Safety” and “A Woman’s Guide to Firearms.” 

Many of these tapes are low-budget, DIY ventures, limited in production and circulation. Before the advent of YouTube and social media, these types of ethnographic videotapes served as instructional tools. They’re also rare windows into everyday life, from a time when film was typically reserved for Hollywood productions and television stations.

Okubo and Antonucci met at the San Francisco Art Institute, where both were MFA students. In  2010, a group of Okubo’s artist friends rented out the basement as a shared studio. Shortly after, Okubo joined the basement, and Antonucci followed suit a few years later.

At the beginning, the basement was completely empty — in Antonucci’s words, “a proper basement.” Unsubstantiated rumors swirled around the basement’s past. Depending on who you ask, it used to be a sweatshop, a drug lab or a porn studio.

When Okubo moved in, he trucked his “small pile” of VHS tapes into the basement. At first, the tapes were simple entertainment. The basement didn’t have proper Wi-Fi, and their work could be monotonous, so Okubo and Antonucci would pop VHS tapes into an old cabinet TV and let them play as they printed. 

They soon discovered they shared the same obsessions: analog media, science fiction and horror. It wasn’t long before they began collecting tapes in earnest. 

At first, they would grab every tape available, scooping entire VHS collections at garage sales. But as the years went by, they became more selective. Okubo said he became fixated on finding “really weird tapes”: amateur films, B-movies, VHS tapes too obscure to have made the leap to streaming services.

The types of movies they were looking for, according to Antonucci, were “movies that didn’t have the preservation efforts that more established films have.” 

Box office films are likely to be preserved; amateur films, pornography and direct-to-video tapes are not. Nowadays, archival groups like Vinegar Syndrome are well established. But when Antonucci and Okubo began collecting, “it actually felt pretty pressing,” Antonucci said. “Like, if we don’t sort of hunt out these films and make a space for them, are they going to even exist?”

“There’s this period of time after a medium dies, before it enters into the rarity-scarcity market, where it’s completely worthless,” he added. He and Okubo happened to begin collecting during that window, before VHS tapes became a commodity, and they watched them transform into collectors’ items.

Over the years, tapes have become increasingly hard to find, especially as other fans got in on the action. According to Okubo, two remaining areas in the U.S. are unspoiled hotspots for VHS collectors: Pennsylvania and central Florida. 

Okubo and Antonucci sometimes refer to their collection as a “VHS seed bank.” The phrase is a reference to the Global Seed Vault, an underground Norwegian facility which stores the seeds of almost every known plant in the world. The vault is a safeguard against doomsday events, like nuclear catastrophes, as well as individual extinctions. The idea is that a plant may be common one day, gone the next. Everything is worth preserving. 

Which is why they consider a 1997 tape on “Tree Stand Safety” to be precious.

Still, preservation has its limits. Although some indie imprints still release films on VHS, they use already-existing blank VHS tapes — new cassettes are no longer produced, and the world’s last VCR was produced in 2016. Plus, VHS is a degenerative medium. 

“Unlike a DVD or streaming service, every time you watch a VHS … it is literally falling apart,” Okubo said. With each viewing, VHS tapes become increasingly warped. The films flicker and fuzz. In 100 years, when all the VCRs break down, will the content of these tapes be lost to history?

But Okubo and Antonucci don’t let the archivist’s impulse distract from the tapes’ original purpose: to be screened, rewound and screened again. Every Wednesday night, the Basement hosts watch parties that are open to the public. Okubo and Antonucci take turns picking out the tapes, announcing screenings on Instagram. On Fridays, they discuss the week’s film on Radio Valencia with any attendees who decide to join.

The point of the collection isn’t to hoard, Okubo stressed. It’s to build community and expose the films to a wider audience. And if some film gets warped in the process, it’s not the end of the world. For Okubo, VHS’s transience is exactly what makes it special. 

“I love this sort of romantic idea of watching a movie that you’re only going to be able to see this one time, this one way, forever,” he said.