Description

A Location for film lovers…

Video rental stores are disappearing from around NZ. You have to look hard to find where they are hidden. Do you miss going down to your local store to spend hours checking out the shelves, getting lost in thought as different covers caught your eye and you flipped them over to read the back? Remember the first online video rental company Fatso, with a DVD & Blu-ray mail-out rental service that went all over New Zealand? 

In case you didn’t know, there’s still one video store that has survived Covid and the rise of streaming. Alice In Videoland is a Christchurch-based DVD rental store with a national mail-out service. Alice has kept the Fatso spirit alive, with a rental library of over 28,000 titles. Streaming services are great for new and popular titles, but can’t offer this kind of extensive back catalogue including foreign films, documentaries and local content. Alice also has specialist sections for horror, sci-fi, cult and music as well as more mainstream drama, comedy, classic and romance.

Alice co-owner Peter Tonks goes out every week, trawling the most obscure reaches of the internet and Canterbury’s second-hand stores to get those elusive titles that no-one else has. Tonks says “We get some requests in from customers and I do my best to find them. Sometimes it’s a bit of detective work, especially now that many new films are no longer released on DVD and big retailers like The Warehouse no longer stock DVDs. Alice is determined to preserve the DVD format – in 20 years, DVD will have its renaissance, just like vinyl now.”

One of the most popular sections in the Alice library is the “Top 500” – a carefully-curated selection of the best films ever made. Tonks admits “There’s quite a bit of debate about some of these choices – my staff like to tell me about all the great films I’ve left out and complain about some I’ve left in. I’m thinking about doing a voting system where our subscribers can vote in a new title and vote out another one each month – to keep things interesting.”

Tonks notes “There’s a whole generation now who have never had computers with disk drives and never had a DVD player. DVDs can be even better than streaming. I love watching all the director’s commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage and blooper reels that come with DVDs. And you can keep watching if the internet goes down!“

Alice has one of the biggest selection of films available on DVD in New Zealand and Tonks hopes their door to door mail-out service will satisfy film lovers all over the country.

Alice In Videoland DVD Mail-Out Service

Alice DVD Library