Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History Of Friday The 13th

Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013)

Runtime: 400 minutes (not a misprint)

Directed by: Daniel Farrands

Starring: This is a documentary; many people from all the films are in it and it is narrated by Corey Feldman; yes.

From: 1428 Films

As a big fan of the documentary Never Sleep Again (from the same people), I hope I didn't have to wait as long to try and find it to give it a viewing, and I didn't. I found the discs recently and not even I could watch it in one day, so I spread it across two nights. Here's the Letterboxd review, and note that I'll return on Tuesday night:

It took a long while but I finally found the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy and once I sat down to watch it, I thought it was great and gave it 4 ½ stars as it's a 4 hour comprehensive look at that franchise and it's done oh so well. So, I was naturally happy when I heard that they were doing a similar thing with the Friday the 13th franchise.

While overall this isn't as great as Never Sleep Again in many ways, it's still well worth seeing, especially if you enjoy the Jason Voorhees films and grew up watching and enjoying them. This is also thorough, lasting 400 minutes in total; I watched it over a span of two nights. You get to see various people from all the films give their thoughts; it's not as extensive as in NSA but I understand as I imagine most of those actors are quite difficult to track down or it may be hard to convince them to participate. All the films are still given their proper respect and enough time to give their backstories and honestly explain why they did or did not work.

Also, it has to be said that many of the people involved with this did the His Name Was Jason documentary, and in fact some bits from that are used here; from interviews I know that there was a “meddling producer” who screwed things up and that's why HNWJ ended up only being a 90 minute cursory glance at the franchise; they had the rights to that footage so it was used much better here.

Considering NSA and this were small productions done without the benefits of a lot of money or a huge crew, everyone did a fantastic job with both documentaries and gave a great present for the hardcore fanbase of both franchises, which are popular and yet rarely get their just due to what they are.