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Newb82

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The "Worst Movie You've Ever Seen" got me thinking about the great book on the FRIDAY THE 13TH series, which in turn got me thinking about the amazing documentary NEVER SLEEP AGAIN: THE ELM STREET LEGACY. It's a whopping four hours long, but if you're interested in the "Freddy" movies at all, the four hours blows by. Plus, the bonus DVD has some more good stuff in tthe extended interviews.

The docs for the HALLOWEEN series (25 YEARS OF TERROR) & FRIDAY THE 13TH (HIS NAME WAS JASON) are good too, but NEVER SLEEP AGAIN blows them away because the team that made it (who also made HNWJ) made it independently, so it wasn't a studio project like that one.

I've seen a doc on THE OMEN series which was pretty disappointing.

I'm interested in all that went in to making really memorable movies. What are some good/bad/indifferent movie docs y'all have seen?

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His Name Was Jason is fucking terrible.

 

The Halloween one is quite good.

 

The Snowball Effect: The Making of Clerks is absolutely incredible, and, really, almost all of Smith's films have a really good making of doc.  Tracing Amy, Back To The Well (Clerks II), and Popcorn Porn (I think that was the title) are all really fascinating.  In fact, the Zack & Miri one is probably better than the movie.

 

Dangerous Days: The Making of Blade Runner should have been screened theatrically and nominated for an Oscar.

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I'm waiting with baited breath for the day "The Best Worst Movie" documentary about Troll 2 is on Netflix.  The fact that there's a cult that goes to showings and does Rocky Horror-type shit AND EVEN HAS THE ACTORS FROM THE MOVIE THERE warms my heart.  I remember a clip with the dad from that movie re-enacting the "You can't piss on hospitality, I WON'T ALLOW IT~!" line and it was hilarious.

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Best Worst Movie was on Netflix not too long ago. That's how I saw it.

 

Lost in La Mancha is tremendous. It's about Terry Gilliam trying to make a Don Quixote film with Johnny Depp. Epic Fail. It would be a good double feature with Hearts of Darkness, the Apocalypse Now doc. You can see two directors go mad, but one produces a cinematic classic and the other one produces...nothing.

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I guess I'll be the guy who has to flip the intention of a thread in order to pimp his choice (and then is beaten to posting it by 30 seconds by Jaed):

 

Best behind the scene doc about making a movie I ever saw was Lost In La Mancha. It's about Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp's ill-fated attempt to make a Don Quixote movie. The reason I say it flips the intention of thread is that while it starts as a behind the scenes "making of," the movie ultimately never gets made due to about a billion catastrophes, all of which the doc chronicles in great detail.

 

My second favorite is Overnight. Again, it might not be exactly what you're looking for. It follows Troy Duffy through the process of selling the script and securing production for Boondock Saints. Duffy is such a magnificent asshole that you quickly figure out why he was a one-movie wonder while also getting a glimpse of what kind of Bizzaro World exists out in La-La Land.

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It fits the spirit of the thread, so in the immortal words of Mills Lane "I'll allow it".

I heard rumors a few months ago that there was going to be another attempt at a FRIDAY THE 13TH series doc to be made more like NEVER SLEEP AGAIN (which again I can't recommend highly enough).

That could be good, but I'm not sure how neccessarry it is with the CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES book already out. The only movie a new doc could shed real light on is the re-boot.

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It's not about a single movie, but My Best Friend, which Werner Herzog directed about his relationship with Klaus Kinski is really great. In that same vein, Burden of Dreams is also very good. It's essentially the same thing, but about the process of Fitzcarraldo. 

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All my easy gimmes were already mentioned for the most part, but there's others.  Zombie Girl is a cute look at a little girl who homemade a bloody R-rated zombie movie, S&Man is a fun doc about the grungy world of super-low-budget horror films that are essentially fake snuff and makeup demos, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a pretty devastating broadside against the MPAA and their hypocritical rating practices.  And while I haven't watched them, I'm told the special editions of Lord of the Rings have a whole bunch of incredibly, stupidly thorough and detailed making-of features; the Alien Quadrilogy boxed set has some nice ones as well.  

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Best Worst Movie is back up on Netflix Instant but you're all posers for not mentioning American Movie.

It's streaming free on Crackle and you can't call yourselves a real documentary, horror, or movie fan until you've seen it.

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My Best Fiend is tremendous and got me into both Herzog and Kinski. The Apocalypse Now one is equally great. I'm pretty sure I saw most of Never Sleep Again on TV and it was good and very in-depth (no Patricia Arquette though? weird). The Jason one was okay. 

 

A couple off the top of my head: the doc on Zombie by Lucio Fulci on the extra disc from its second DVD release was the shit. The fact that they added in the late Dakar (Lucas) playing a couple gorgeous flamenco songs on his guitar completely at random blew me away. Same goes for the Texas Chainsaw 2 bonus doc. For a legit release Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride about Where the Buffalo Roam and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was actually a better memorial for Hunter S. Thompson than the doc about his books. There's a ton of great anecdotes and recycled film on him from other docs in there. At the end Harry Dean Stanton reads his note to Hunter that he wrote for the funeral but wasn't allowed to read at, then he sings "Danny Boy", and if you have any heart at all you'll be crying like a baby during it. Everyone from Tom Wolfe to George McGovern to crazy-ass Gary Busey to William Buckley Jr. (!) is in this one. If you dig the Gonzo it's a must-see.

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Maybe not quite fitting into the discussion, but Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION probably introduced me to more must-see movies than anything else ever has.  It's a film about a pay-channel in Los Angeles competing with HBO and Showtime but they showed arty and little remembered films with the blockbusters.  And they show all these great clips that make you want to add them to your queue immediately (and there seems to be a running joke that if a movie contains full frontal female nudity, that's the clip that gets shown.)

 

And it's a must-see for wrestling fans, considering its Chris Benoit parallels.  There's something kind of off about hearing all these people talking about how great the program director was and what a genius he was when he ended up committing murder.

 

BEST WORST MOVIE was a letdown.  I don't need to be told time and time again about how awesomely bad a movie is when I already know it is.  But it is worth it for showing how far the mother has fallen and the harsh reality when the father thinks his cult role is a much bigger deal than it really is.

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IFC's The American NIghtmare is a really great doc about the evolution of horror films in the '70s with Romero, Craven, Cronenberg, Hooper et al all talking about their mindsets at the time. It's like the better version of Nighmares in Red, White, and Blue with only emphasis on the revolutionary titles that shook everything up and took on the outlook of the Vietnam generation. 

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  • 4 months later...

Figure this is a better thread for it...

So I'm now about half-way through the CRYSTAL LAKE MEMORIES doc, and it's definitely a step down from NEVER SLEEP AGAIN, for a few reasons.

1.) If you already own the book, this is basically the movie version of it, in that it ads nothing new and a lot being excised.

2.) Way too much recycled footage from HIS NAME WAS JASON.

3.) So far, most of the entertaining bitchiness from some of the people towards the movies they were involved in that was in the book is not here, so it's coming off as more of a fluff piece than NSA. Nothing in-depth at all about what went wrong with any of them so far. Jingus, I'd go with the book over the DVD if I were you.

4.) So far, any "big names" that happened to be in one of these (Bacon, Glover) are not in it, even though they were interviewed for the book. The biggest name involved is Feldman, who also provides a pretty limp narration.

So far the only thing it's contributed is alerting me to the deaths of a couple people that have passed in between the book's publication and the DVD (Danny Steinman & Richard Brooker). The only other thing it appears to offer is insight into the remake, which isn't covered in the book.

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I don't know if this along the lines of the topic, but I really like the "Return of the Living Dead" BTS on the first release of that film. Dan O'Bannon is very interesting to hear talk about his work.

Along those lines, the BTS off the first Collector's ed of "American Werewolf in London" is also quite good.

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Per The Disaster Artist, Tommy Wiseau had a seperate camera person film everyone behind the scenes and during their scenes. Ostensibly it was for a documentary, but Sestero claims Wiseau was really just spying on everyone and trying to find out what the crew thought of his acting and directing ability.  Camera guy apparently caught the majority of the wackiness that went on behind the scenes.

 

Presumably the footage is still in Tommy's garage/basement/dungeon. I would sacrifice my first born to see it.

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