22/10/2026
📼Video Shop Tales of Terror II: Lust & Revenge (2025)📼
It’s time dig out your membership card again and head back to the Video Dungeon, where the Proprietor, Clara and a whole host of familiar faces return for another low-fi British horror anthology. This time, the stories are tied together by lust and revenge, with fake trailers, daft adverts and short films all packed into a VHS-soaked wraparound tale. We kick off with The Amityville Pancake, a splendid piss-take of The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror, followed by The Beast of No-Man’s Land, where Germans are picked off by some sort of cat-human hybrid. Both trailers are great fun and set the tone nicely. Then it’s back to the Video Dungeon, with the Curator’s disembodied head on the telly, a very funny Mary Whitehouse joke nodding to the first film, and Miss Dani Teeze played once again by the lovely Dani Thompson giving us a recap, complete with a few contract-related gags.
Clara is back, introduced with a catchy sitcom style song as she tries to wriggle out of the contract she signed to stay alive. She’s made a bit of a balls up of running the shop, so the returning proprietor is back to train her and dish out his own particular brand of punishment. After the titles, we’re off into the stories. First up is Richard Rowntree’s The Gory Hole, a short, sharp shock about the dangers of meeting mysterious women in a bar, especially when you’re a married man. It certainly made me cross my legs. Next comes The Silent Photographer, a cracking little Giallo parody with a fun sting in its tail. Tony Mardon & Alex Churchyard’s Invasion at Studio 69 has a wonderfully daft Twilight Zone, Plan 9 from Outer Space and 60s Doctor Who Vibe on the set of a sci-fi p**n parody. There’s even a s*x education lesson, and it’s nice to spot Tom Lee Rutter on the cover of a book plus Laurence R. Harvey and Charlie Bond also return from the first film, adding to the familiar faces. It’s another fun tale, and then Benny Southpaw turns up with a fantastically unPC Meatball Sub advert just gloriously silly stuff. Dodgy Dan gives us a cheeky dig at video piracy before intermission, and then Tom Lee Rutter is back as Jake Flamingo in The Revenge of Jake Flamingo. It’s a spot on parody of the sort of films you’d find in a video shop: always apparently made by an Italian with an American-sounding name. More trailers follow, including BasVegas Boss Bitch and St******se Massacre 8. I was in stitches. This is aimed squarely at us old VHS heads, and I’m absolutely here for it. I still collect tapes, so it feels as if this film was made for me. There’s a demonic training video for Video Dungeon employees, another appearance from Rutter, a Bloody Mary advert and then Nuns with Buns. The silliness just keeps coming. The Crucifer and the Le***an Vampires of the SS brings us grindhouse thrills you just can’t beat a s*xy N**i vampire, before the 1970s crime trailer The Guvnor, which looks to be parodying Cliff Twemlow’s films. Spawn of the Decorator keeps the exploitation fun rolling. Debbie Lane’s animated segment, The Portrait of Professor Solomon, is a real highlight. The stop motion work is fabulous, bringing to mind the strange animated shorts from the likes of Jan Svankmajer that used to turn up on BBC Two in the 1980s, with a hefty dose of Cronenbergian body horror thrown in. Then the Skeazy Mr Daniels returns, upgraded to Professor Daniels, with a bride made from the rebuilt Paula: FrankenPaula, in a brilliant riff on Frankenhooker. Liz’s Low Price Lifeless Parlour advert delivers another dose of utter madness, before Alexander Churchyard’s Trashed takes us on a man’s journey through the rubbish and into a bizarre world of TV-headed people, s*xy vampires, the Curator and Miss Dani Teeze. Packed with character cameos, callbacks and gross-out humour, it ties together the film’s stories and trailers as a debt comes due. The Video Dungeon wraparound is a lot of fun, with the proprietor showing Clara how the job is done and taking revenge on anyone who messes with the shop. This time, there’s a crew of zombie employees, and there are VHS references galore keep an eye out for that copy of Dark Side magazine. Stick around for both the mid credit and end credit scenes, too. I loved the first film, but for me this is even better. The returning actors and characters are a real treat, and the stories, trailers and adverts flow together with a stronger VHS thread running through them. It’s funny, weird, gross and gory, with cracking little songs on the soundtrack: a love letter to the video-shop era and Amicus anthology films, with a generous dash of Troma thrown in. I loved it, and I’m already looking forward to Part III.
