If you are watching this, you better have a looong time to kill.
Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)
Directed By:Daniel Farrands and Andrew Kasch
The Prologue
Documentaries cam be tricky little boogers. More times than not one about a horror film is used simply as extra material for a DVD release of the film in question, but as of late there seems to be a trend of horror films having documentaries done over them and being released by themselves as stand alone films. Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy will without question in my mind go down as THE granddaddy of stand alone horror documentaries. Clocking in at around four hours (not even counting the extras on disc 2), it’s something you need to set aside a lot of time to watch. But something I’d recommend you watch at least once if you care about the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise at all.
The Movie
Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, isn’t just a horror documentary, it’s THE horror documentary. Never before has a film of this nature spent this much time covering every single entry in a horror franchise. But here it all is, from the original A Nightmare on Elm street from 1984 to 2003′s Freddy vs. Jason, it is all here with all the stories, backstage details, and lore. Not just from second hand accounts, but from the people you want to hear it from that were right at the heart of these films. Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Wes Craven and everyone else ever involved in this horror legend’s history is either here in the flesh or talked about, as we take a loooong trip down the history of horror’s most famous street and the icon that haunted it.
The thing about a film like this is, you have to really be careful how you go about making it. Naturally it’s going to be mainly targeted at the diehards of the series and the average fan might not like the length, but you need to give the watcher new stuff that even the biggest of Freddy fans might not even know before seeing it here. While the Friday the 13th documentary, His Name Was Jason, wasn’t the worst thing ever, it lacked telling us anything new as it breezed through the many entries in the franchise. And to make matters worse, if you owned the box set and watched the special features disc, you had already heard all of it. Sure, there’s some of the same ol’ stories here with Never Sleep Again that you’ve all heard before. But at the same time, I’m happy to report as we spend a fair amount of time on each film, we learn a whole lot of new stuff as well.
What makes things even better is that nothing is put before you all cleaned up with a cherry on top. Everyone in their interviews of course talks about how much they loved working on a Freddy film and all that, but if they had any issues with anything it is also brought out in the open. Among the many things we take a dive into is Wes Craven and his somewhat love/hate relationship he has with former New Line head, Robert “Bob” Shaye, his detest of having sequels to the original, and his thoughts on what Freddy became. Also, we learn which Nightmare film had a director that Bob just didn’t seem to care about at all. Now if there was one bad thing I have to say about this thing, it’s that while they do talk about Johnny Depp we sadly don’t hear anything from him in regard to this. It’s understandable, but still you wish he was around for this stuff cause you’d love to hear what he thinks of it now.
The run-time is somewhat of a turn off, but how else would you really be able to dive into each entry and cover such grand issues as the gay overtones and metaphors of part 2? That’s right, the giant pink elephant in the room is finally brought out in the open and spoke about in detail. Now maybe that stuff is great to run through for your first watching, but due to the length of it, don’t look for many of your friends to love it if they aren’t hardcore fans. Also, don’t be shocked if even you yourself skips around stuff during repeat viewings. But as far as overall entertainment and details mixed with really good information regarding the subject matters goes, you can’t really go wrong with Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy.
The Conclusion
I was always more of a Jason fan, but this blows, He Name Was Jason, out of the lake! It’s fun seeing everyone reflect back on what has become a great and legendary franchise like A Nightmare on Elm street and to see opinions about how much of pop culture icon Freddy really has became since we first seen this child killer in 1984. I’d say we may never see another horror film documentary even remotely comes close to this one here. A must see!
The Rating (8.5/10)
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