Where movie fans found their tribe

9/30/2026

I loved going to the video rental store as a kid. In the Quad Cities, there was Hogan’s Video in Moline along with The Movie Store and Jeff’s Corner in Milan. The first two shut down when chains such as Blockbuster Video moved in. Jeff’s got in trouble for dubbing bootleg tapes to increase its inventory and make more money on rentals.

In Cedar Rapids, there was Mr. Movies, a place where I could rent seven movies for $7 — a cheap weekend thrill for a kid with a working single mother. This is where I found my taste for movies such as “Faces of Death,” “Phantasm” and “Class of Nukem’ High.” They set the tone for what I would fall in love with later in life.

Des Moines had its spots, too. When I moved here in 2007, I was instantly told about Best Place Ever. Sadly, I never made the pilgrimage. Everything I have come to know about the place has been through friends who found it during the impressionable years of their lives.

You may have seen the stickers: “Have you ever been to the BEST PLACE EVER?” For teenagers Angelo Rossi and Saulaman Schlegel, spotting those stickers around the Drake neighborhood was the beginning of a mystery.

Rossi, who cleaned windows and swept floors at The Lift and Vaudeville Mews while in high school, remembers joking with friends about the name. Schlegel recalls driving around a corner in the Drake neighborhood and realizing the place actually existed. What they found was a video store with shelves that could send any teenager with a taste for cinema into a euphoric state.

Best Place Ever opened in 2003, according to founding owner TJ Wood. He, Adam Senecaut and Grant Wilson were in their early 20s and looking for something to build together. They loved Oddities, a video store in Sherman Hill, and felt the void when it closed.

They developed a business plan for a store of their own while sitting at the now-gone Cup O’ Kryptonite coffee shop. Wood said his parents mortgaged the family home to secure the loan. The three took a space near Drake on 24th Street, renovated it and built the shelves themselves.

Rossi remembers the layout being similar to a chain rental store but with “the atmosphere of a Midwest church basement.” Its selection, he said, was another matter. Instead of dozens of copies of a blockbuster, there might have been one copy of “Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies.”

The founders wanted to stock the films they had trouble finding elsewhere. Wood said Grant developed a room devoted to Criterion releases. The partners sought obscure titles and cultivated customers who shared their curiosity. They advertised, cross-promoted with neighboring businesses and put coupons in Big Tomato Pizza boxes.

“That appetite for discovery shaped the screening room in back. Inside the doors, there were a couple of couches and a large television,” Wood said.

Customers could reserve the room to watch films, and roughly a dozen titles were restricted to in-store viewing because they were costly or difficult to replace. Wood recalled an official DVD of “Begotten,” the 1990 experimental horror film that became an obsession for him, and a rare Criterion edition of “The Killer.”

To play some imported DVDs, the store acquired region-free players that could handle discs American players could not. Rossi says much of his time at Best Place Ever has become blurred, but watching that film in the back room has not.

“That’s an important one for me,” he said.

Schlegel took friends there to watch “Begotten,” “Rubber Johnny” and “Eraserhead,” sometimes returning to a film more than once. He remembers renting “American Hardcore” and a documentary about GG Allin. His mother found out about the latter, made him watch part of it with her and told him never to bring anything like it into her house again.

He took dates to Best Place Ever, too, and he suspects that it did not always make a favorable impression.

Wood left after about six years when the startup loan was paid off. He does not know precisely why the store later closed, but, at the time, Netflix was a four-letter word. It killed Blockbuster, Movie Gallery and Family Video with its mail-order DVD program, which is now long gone, too.

I asked Wood if he thought video stores could make a comeback here, as they have in other communities. We riffed back and forth on the idea, but one thing seems clear: If streaming fatigue is ever going to create an opening for the old video-store experience, that moment may be here.

Because people are not just tired of scrolling through 14 streaming services trying to decide what to watch. They miss discovering something. They miss wandering the aisles. They miss arguing with a friend over what to rent. They miss the weird movie tucked between two movies they have never heard of. They miss taking a chance.

Maybe that is what Best Place Ever really sold. Not movies. Possibilities. ♦

Kristian Day is a filmmaker and writer based in Des Moines. He also hosts the syndicated Iowa Basement Tapes radio program on 98.9 FM KFMG. Instagram: @kristianday | Twitter: @kristianmday