Customers looking for nostalgia can buy records, make music, and rent DVDs at this new Camden County shop
Joseph Mallah, owner of Vintage Future Now, shares his space with his friend Mike Jada, who has turned his own lifelong movie collection into Deja Vu Video.
A new storefront in Collingswood is a one-stop shop for music makers, record lovers, and those who really miss renting VHS tapes.
Joseph Mallah, the owner of Vintage Future Now, is still figuring out how to describe the place.
“It’s like a bag of squirrels. I don’t know,” he said. “How do I say stuff about it?”
Mallah, 42, recently opened the shop at 554 Haddon Ave. as a hodgepodge of all the things he likes. After moving to South Jersey, he said he wanted to invent a creative space for artists to make and buy music.
Mallah shares his Vintage Future Now space with his friend Mike Jada, who has turned his own lifelong movie collection into Deja Vu Video, where people can rent some of Jada’s favorite movies.
In the backroom, there are instruments, from synthesizers to guitars, and recording equipment for local bands who need a place to experiment. In the middle of the store, Ropeadope, a music and apparel brand, sells jazz-adjacent vinyl and T-shirts.
The walls, peppered with film and band posters, will eventually feature pictures of customers that Mallah takes with his Polaroid (at the end of September, there were two). As decor, there’s a mini golf-putting green, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines, and a pile of old People magazines.
Mallah said he wants to give local musicians a low-stakes environment to record quick songs without too much thought, and then release their music onto his shelves so their neighbors can take a listen.
“Can you imagine if we did an EP a week or album a month for 30 years?” Mallah said. “If you dug it up later ... what did the people in South Jersey feel?”
After years spent teaching Logic Pro at Apple, working at Adventure Aquarium, mailing records, and helping Philly bands cut demos in his garage, Mallah said having his own business could help him spend more time with family.
Deja Vu Video — the DVD, Blu-ray, and VHS rental area — takes up the front of the shop. Jada estimated that about 3,000 films and TV series are on display and categorized by genre, ranging from Poliziotteschi/Eurocrime to Bigfoot to Legit Cinema, a section for movies that are on the more-normal side, he said.
After years of accumulating physical media, Jada, a Haddon Township resident, decided it was time to share his passion with the community. He met Mallah at Collingswood Music, a store that sells instruments and vinyl records and offers music lessons.
The movies, rentable for $5 per week, come from Jada’s personal library, taken from his storage space and from a friend who had been holding onto the films to save Jada space.
His favorite collection is a mishmash genre he calls Bikers, Hippies, Hillbillies, Cars, and Creeps, which includes 1971 horror film Werewolves on Wheels. Some movies are for rent as a pair to make themed double features, like The Incredible Shrinking Man and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman or The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant and The Thing with Two Heads.
It’s been more than a decade since Blockbuster declared bankruptcy, years since the death of Redbox, and longer since the COVID-19 pandemic solidified the appeal of streaming services. But as movie theaters make a comeback in the Philly region and people crave holding physical media in their own two hands, the appetite for a video, music, and record store isn’t so surprising. Mallah and Jada haven’t hosted a grand opening yet, but they’ve already had shoppers wander through their doors and sign up for rentals.
“It’s not like we’re going to put Netflix out of business or anything,” Mallah said. “We just have to pay the rent.”
Recently, Doug Huber, 26, left work at Cafe 1903 down the street to check out the new shop, which has started testing the waters with soft opening hours. He said he hasn’t visited a video rental store since his last stop at South Jersey’s long-closed Wow Video when he was a kid.
“The fact that you have Bill Bixby’s The Incredible Hulk, like, the complete series?” Huber said. The 1977 TV show featured Bixby as Dr. David Banner and Lou Ferrigno, a 6-foot-5 bodybuilder, as his green counterpart.
Huber, who picked up a shirt from the Ropeadope section and posed for one of Mallah’s Polaroids, said he’d likely be back, potentially to pick up a sci-fi horror film. His favorite is The Thing.
In 2026, most people don’t have VHS and DVD players laying around their houses. To fix that problem, Jada is working on collecting equipment that customers will eventually be able to rent and take home with their movie of choice.
Plus, Jada still has more films back home awaiting shelf space, so he plans to rotate the selection over time.
“I feel like every town should have a video store,” Jada said. “And once upon a time, they did. Then they got displaced by the big chains, and then got displaced by streaming. Now that it seems like the sentiment toward streaming has changed a little bit, it seems like it’s a good opportunity to bring some of this stuff back.”
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