Basement VHS Fest brings Phenomena, Death Spa and The Boxer's Omen to 4 Star Theater on Sunday, Aug. 30. The all-day version is tempting, but the single-ticket move is cleaner unless the pass price is confirmed at checkout.

CinemaSFBay's official 4 Star listing for Phenomena (external source, opens in a new tab) puts Basement VHS Fest at 4 Star Theater, 2200 Clement Street, San Francisco, on Sunday, Aug. 30, with Dario Argento's insect-girl murder-school fever dream starting at 2:30 p.m. The same official calendar has Death Spa at 5:15 p.m. (external source, opens in a new tab) and The Boxer's Omen at 7:30 p.m. (external source, opens in a new tab), which makes this one long Richmond District afternoon if you do the whole thing. The official Phenomena page (external source, opens in a new tab), with the Death Spa (external source, opens in a new tab) and Boxer's Omen (external source, opens in a new tab) pages matching it, points readers to a Basement VHS Fest Pass for the three-film lineup, but as of this Aug. 19 check, the public page text did not show a dollar price, an age/ID policy or a sold-out notice. SF Station's independent event listing (external source, opens in a new tab) lists individual film tickets at $15 and an all-day pass at $35, so check the ticket screen before you build your Sunday around the pass math.

The hook is Basement, not just the VHS label. The 4 Star listings identify Basement as a Mission District art collective and VHS archive with weekly screenings and a Radio Valencia show; SF Station presents the day as the second annual Basement VHS Fest, with a swap and market for tapes and analog oddities alongside the screenings. That is a better fit for a rep-house booth than for the glossy nostalgia-pop-up version of cult cinema, and the lineup understands the assignment: Phenomena gives you Jennifer Connelly at a Swiss boarding school, insects and a murder plot that keeps getting stranger; Death Spa is late-'80s cursed-gym nonsense that practically asks for analog fuzz; The Boxer's Omen is a Shaw Brothers revenge-and-black-magic detour that should look fully unwell on tape.

The all-day version is tempting if SF Station's $35 pass listing holds at checkout. Three individual tickets at $15 would make the pass sensible on price alone. But three movies here means roughly seven hours on Clement once you include breaks, snacks and the dead space between shows. If you are coming from BART, budget for a Muni transfer; there is no convenient BART stop at this end of Clement. If you are driving, build in neighborhood-parking time instead of arriving at 2:25 and hoping the curb opens up for you.

The regular's move is simple: start with Phenomena. It is the cleanest single-ticket choice, it lets you see how the room is handling the day, and it gives you an easy off-ramp if the pass price is not obvious or the marathon starts to feel like too much. If I only had two hours, I would do the 2:30 p.m. screening, get popcorn, and leave the full haunted-tape-deck Sunday to the people who came prepared.