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JD Ramirez and Jacob Markrof both grew up watching the 1984 Charlie Sheen teen action thriller The Wraith on VHS cassette, both admitting they were too young to be watching Sheen’s small-town auto racing fantasy. What they’ve learned since opening the new Buckman neighborhood bar Cult Classics, alongside co-owner Danielle Miner, is how each VHS cassette tape’s film gradually changes depending on the number of times the tape is played or how it is stored. Every tape, like a print from a master artist’s limited-edition series, becomes its own unique art form with minor imperfections that themselves are appreciated over time.
“There’s something about [how] the more you play them, the more warbly, the more degradation, and it still plays and looks good,” Ramirez says. “You appreciate it the more it degrades, and I love that, which is what I love about vinyl in the same way. You don’t get that aesthetic from DVDs and digital format. There’s no degradation in digital, and with DVDs, they just won’t work anymore. Someday, if the internet goes down and the cloud goes down, what are we going to do? We’ll still have tapes.”
Cult Classics opened in February showing the original Terminator movie. Ramirez and Markrof, both 43, and Miner, 37, each amassed a collection of hundreds of VHS titles, pulling from their behind-the-bar library nightly for movies that serve both as background visuals over guest chatter and dedicated screening nights at which film audio is played. Though the medium has been out of style since around the time that Cult Classics’ youngest patrons were born, the VHS resurgence owes to the popularity of retro technology and aesthetics, not to mention the format’s reputation as a sanctuary for hard-to-find movies unavailable to stream.
“The fact that people are so interested in this and people want to bring us tapes and tell us, ‘Dude, this is what we want’—we’ve met so many people who have come out of the woodwork,” Markrof says. The staff at Cinemagic replaced a cassette tape that was destroyed by Cult Classics’ VHS rewinder, an unfortunate accident that’s just an occupational hazard of working with tapes more than 40 years old.
On a recent Friday night, Cult Classics showed An American Werewolf in London (1981) back to back with Showgirls (1995). Guests can still talk through the movies if they so choose. On Sunday, March 16, the bar opened its screening series Sunday Rituals with The Wraith for an attentive audience, switching to Black Moon Rising once the marquee event ended. The rear smoking patio has a different VCR system than the main bar; on Sunday night, it played a silent Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.
Respectively a bartender and security worker, Ramirez and Markrof started Movie Massacre, the biweekly bar film screening series during the last year at Dig A Pony. Like the globally focused Church of Film series, Movie Massacre drew a devoted audience, regularly packing the house two Sundays each month before its host bar closed permanently in 2022.
They and Miner have converted the space that, until last April, held the cocktail bar There Be Monsters. The shuffleboard table is still there, but Cult Classics is now a Day-Glo haven for movie buffs of all experiences. Magenta and cyan lights illuminate Cult Classics’ scores of cassette tapes under that quintessentially ’80s mall color motif. A corner display of tiny retro TVs also screens the same movies as the big screens, surrounded by back issues of horror-focused magazines like Fangoria, Toxic and Gorezone. Detailed large-scale paintings that could be the covers of ’80s occult fantasy novels or metal albums adorn the opposing walls.
The bar and its kitchen’s menus are simple, and affordable, by design. Miner says the snacks are meant to be similar to a movie theater’s concession stand, with hot dogs ($6), curly fries ($6) and soft pretzels ($6). The Wild at Heart mezcal paloma ($12) tastes casually elevated, and though I did not try the Hard Ticket to Hawaii ($10) on my visits, I haven’t been so tempted to drink a cocktail with Dune sandworm bile-blue Hpnotiq (and Titos vodka, peach schnapps, pineapple juice, sour and soda) since college. The cult always beckons.
“The video store was the best thing to do as a kid,” Markrof says. “I think we all agree on that. We were just talking about the fun days of taking back soda and beer cans and like, you know, ‘Oh, cool, I’m going to rent a tape and get a big soda, and that’s my weekend.’”
“We’re all children of Blockbuster,” Miner adds.
On Sunday, March 23, Markrof will celebrate his 44th birthday by showing Total Recall. He loves Paul Verhoeven movies, while Miner wants to find Cronenberg titles and works by obscure directors. They all agree they want Cult Classics to feel like a place where guests step like Schwarzenegger into a 1984 nightclub.
“That is very much—the colors, the sound, everything, everyone’s clothes—that’s what we want this place to look like,” Ramirez says.
SEE IT: Cult Classics, 1308 SE Morrison St., cultclassicspdx.com. 4 pm–2 am Tuesday–Sunday.