A nice little video store in Baltimore. There are two locations in Baltimore (in Charles Village and on Coldspring Lane), and I just found out that there are two in the DC area and two more in Deleware.

This writeup is mostly concerned with the one in the Charles Village. I've never been to the one on Coldspring, and I never even knew about the ones in DC or DE until just 5 minutes ago. If things there are significantly different, /msg me, or add a new writeup about them.

It's a small place, but it's filled nearly to the bursting point with movies, including a good selection of foreign and gay/lesbian interest films. The stuff ranges from Dead Man to Evil Dead, Hitchcock to Robocop. You can also get the Transformers movie there, a rarity nowadays. One thing that confuses people a lot is that some areas are sorted by director, whereas others are sorted into categories (sci-fi, classics, etc). And some are sorted by category, then director. You get used to it.

You can get pretty much anything you might normally find at a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video at Video Americain, but cheaper. If what you want is out (they tend to only have one or at most two copies of any one thing), you can almost always find something else you would enjoy watching.

Until recently, they were purely VHS, but recently DVDs have started to encroach upon the walls.

The staff is well informed and helpful as well. There is a bookshelf near the entrance that holds staff picks, so if you can't figure out what you want, just pull something off there that looks interesting; the staff seems to have pretty good taste.

Here was The City Paper's description of Video Americain when it won "Best Video Store" in the 2001 Best of Baltimore: "Come on, at least try to act surprised."

They have a website: http://www.videoamericain.com/

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