Five Torches (Out of Five)
I’ll be frank: I initially had a hard time putting the words “documentary” together with “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
But there is such a new documentary: Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, just out on DVD.
And I gotta say: it’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen — definitely the best fantasy-themed documentary I can think of.
First, it’s really long: almost four hours, with another four hours of “supplementary” material on a separate DVD.
Because of that, it has the opportunity to go “big,” exploring the themes of the series and each individual movie, but also putting each film in its specific cultural context (and in the context of the current “state” of the franchise: either riding high or fighting for its life).
But because the film is so long, it can also go really, really deep into minutiae — like the time a giant mechanical Freddy model fell over the set, or the ways that Freddy’s make-up evolved over the years.
There’s even a sequence where an actor from one of the films reveals that a close-up shot of him scratching his balls wasn’t really done by him. Hilariously, he then proceeds to show how he would’ve done it, had it been him doing the acting.
The documentary filmmakers have clearly talked to almost everyone who was involved with the series, not matter how insignificant or peripheral the role they played.
(Side-note: it’s easy to forget how many now-huge talents got their start on the Nightmare movies: Patricia Arquette, Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, Renny Harlin, Breckin Meyer, and on and on. Alas, most of these people did not participate in the documentary, although the most important players did: Wes Craven, Harlin, and Robert Englund.)
The best part of the documentary, hands-down, is that it is not a mere paean to the movies. The subjects are allowed to say what they really think about the movies and their experiences working on them. That makes for some fascinating finger-pointing and obviously old grudges exposed.
But mostly, it makes for lots of different opinions about what’s good about the movies, and what isn’t.
Still, the documentary doesn’t just kill you with comprehensiveness. It’s also quite artfully done, seamlessly edited, with each new Elm Street character introduced with an interesting effect where the actor reads his or her character description from the original script.
Heather Langenkamp, the star of three of the movies, narrates.
If you have any interest at all in the Elm Street movies — probably the most famous horror franchise of all time — this is very much worth seeing.
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