Never Sleep Again Part I and... Part II?

Never Sleep Again is without a doubt the ultimate documentary on the Nightmare On Elm St. films.  This is the 2010 film, not to be confused with the 2006 Nightmare On Elm St. documentary also titled Never Sleep Again.  That one's under an hour long and included as a special feature on most Nightmare 1 DVDs.  It's a good little doc about the first film, but this is a comprehensive, four hour marathon about the whole series.  And then when you add in the wealth of additional coverage from the DVD special features, you're really left wanting for nothing.  But then they made a sequel anyway.  Sort of, not really.  But there is a Nightmare doc that's been titled Never Sleep Again Part II, and it's on blu.

P.S.: I just added the Artisan DVD to the Lair Of the White Worm page, too.

Never Sleep Again is co-directed by Andrew Kasch and Daniel Farrands, the latter of whom would go on to direct the even grander Crystal Lake Memories (he also wrote Halloween 6 fifteen years earlier).  But really, this film dives just as deep.  It's a couple hours shorter, but it also had four films fewer to cover, having just missed the Nightmare remake that came out the same year.  The joy of this film, as with Crystal Lake, is that it gives equal time to each of the sequels, talking to all of the directors and nearly all the stars and major personal from every single Nightmare film, including Freddy Vs. Jason, and the syndicated Freddy's Nightmares TV series.  And the fact that it's all packed into one film, means we finally get to hear things like Wes Craven's feelings on the films he wasn't directly involved with.

Never Sleep Again arrived on DVD as a flush 2-disc special edition from CAV Distributing in May, 2010.  A few months later, that October, it was reissued as a 2-disc Collector's Edition, the differences essentially being that it had an exclusive audio commentary, a slipcover and a poster.  And in 2014, Image released it on blu (with the commentary).  Meanwhile, it's been released again and again in Germany, including expensive mediabook editions, limited edition covers, and multi-disc sets that pair it with Part 2, with a lot of exclusive special features.  The latest edition landed this June as a nicely priced 2-disc blu-ray set of both documentaries from Alive, with all of the extras.

2010 US CAV DVD top; 2019 DE Alive BD below.

Despite primarily being a talking heads movie, you really see the difference watching this movie in HD.  The film is presented in 1.78:1 in both cases, but the generally soft image of the DVD is smartened up with more photo-realistic skin and hair.  The DVD also some darker, slightly crushed colors and look at how jagged the on-screen text turns out - yuck.  Getting this on blu is a real improvement.  But that's not to say everything's perfect.  The BD demonstrates some unfortunate banding in the backgrounds, presumably because this disc tries to squeeze so much onto a single, dual-layered disc.  You've got the full four hour film, plus hours and hours (of admittedly mostly standard def) extras.  The blu is a big step up from the DVD, but it could definitely step higher still if they were willing to spread this across two discs.  ...Just to be clear, yes, there is a second blu-ray disc in this set, but that's reserved for Part 2.  All of Part 1 and its extras are on this one BD.  So it's not ideal; but given that, it does fare better than you'd expect.

CAV's DVD presents the film's audio in a clean Dolby Digital AC3 stereo mix with optional English subtitles.  Alive's blu-ray bumps it up to DTS-HD and includes an alternative German dub (also in DTS-HD), though it loses the subtitles.

So what the heck is this Never Sleep Again, Part II already?  Well, you saw it advertised on the Part 1 release (every edition has the promo), but there it was called I Am Nancy.  In fact, star Heather Langenkamp has been selling it as a DV-R through her site under that title since Part 1 came out.  But in Germany, it's been released on DVD and BD as Never Sleep Again, Part II.  This is very different from the first Never Sleep Again, instead focusing just on Heather.  Ostensibly, it's asking the question how come the Nancy character isn't as famous or beloved as the Freddy character, despite her's being the protagonist and, you know, the non-child murderer.  But it's largely an excuse for her to use her footage at conventions and meeting her fans, very much along the lines of Jamie Lee Curtis's The Night She Came Home or Bruce Campbell's Fanalysis.  It's cute, and does include interviews with people like Craven and Robert Englund, but nothing essential like the first Never Sleep Again (or second, I guess, if we're counting that 2006 one).

2019 DE Alive BD.

This film's presented in 1.78:1, too, and despite being on a blu-ray disc, looks soft.  I've read speculation online that this is just an upconvert, which may well be true.  But it could just be the quality of the original footage, as this seems to have been largely shot on phones and/ or consumer cameras.  I don't have the US DV-R to compare it to, but my guess is this blu might just look ever so slightly better?  Because while it mostly looks like DVD quality footage (or less, in the case of some of the archival inserts, but that's to be expected with documentaries), it doesn't quite have all the fuzzy artifacts I'd expect to see on a DV-R.  At any rate, clicking through the screenshots above will at least show you how this particular edition comes across.

One plus, at least, is that the blu can give us uncompressed audio, and does, with both the original English track and a German dub presented in DTS-HD.  No subtitles.  Apparently, the version Langenkamp sells includes 14 minutes of deleted footage (extended interview clips and a music video).  Disappointingly, those did not find their way onto any of the German releases.  The only extra here is the teaser trailer for the first Never Sleep Again. 

The only I Am Nancy extra, that is.  Because like the US edition, the German Part 1 blu-ray is loaded with features.  In fact, it's got way more goodies, to an almost overwhelming degree.  So let's start with the US release, almost all of which was ported over the the German versions.

Like I said earlier, depending which US release you got, it may or may not have the audio commentary by the documentary filmmakers over the whole four hours.  Everything else, though, is on every US edition.  That includes roughly 90 minutes of additional interview footage, essentially extending the doc to five and a half hours.  Then there are several featurettes, including one on fan fascination with the Freddy glove, one on the Nightmare On Elm St. comic books, one on the movies' soundtracks, one on devoted fans of the franchise and one on the poster artist.  There's a great episode of Horror's Hallowed Grounds on the Elm St. films and even an interview with the Angry Video Game Nerd about the Elm St. Nintendo game.  There's an extensive promo (roughly 7 minutes worth) for I Am Nancy, a silly Nightmare In Elm St. in 10 Minutes featurette where the stars recite their most famous lines from the films, the documentary teaser and an easter egg of Charles Fleischer interview outtakes.

The German release has all of that except the commentary, the annoying 10 Minutes thing, and the easter egg.  Also, for some strange reason, their Fred Heads featurette, the one about the fans, is about seven minutes shorter than the US one.  But everything else, from the Hallowed Grounds episode to the most important, 90 minutes of additional interviews, is here.  And yes, this is all on the 2019 release, too (the back cover doesn't mention any extras, making it seem barebones, but it sure isn't).

And the German release also has an additional, oh... seven fricken' hours of additional, exclusive extras!  And almost all of it is archival Elm St.-related footage, mostly of VHS quality.  For example, there is almost 90 minutes of behind the scenes footage from one of the Freddy's Nightmares episodes discussed in the doc.  There's additional behind the scenes footage of most of the sequels, ranging in length from five seconds to over two and a half hours... it's crazy!  They have extended footage of Robert Englund making the Dokken music video, the full 23 minute gag reel for Nightmare 7, special effects test footage and the complete Slash & Burn MTV special with Englund in character as Freddy.

The depth of material on here will blow your mind when you finally try to watch it all.  There's roughly eleven hours packed onto the first disc, it's amazing it plays at all.  And then there's still a second disc with a whole other documentary on it.  If you're a completist, you might still want the US release for the commentary and other little odds and ends, but I can't honestly imagine very many people sitting through everything in this German release and still yearning for more.  It's nuts.  I love it.

Breaking Mrs. Dalloway Out of DVD Prison

Here's a perfect little case study for why everybody should go region free: Marleen Gorris's/ Viriginia Woolf's excellent Mrs. Dalloway.  And it's not just the fact that it's only available as a region locked import blu.  Even if you took a "I'm fine sticking with the DVD for this one," because for some reason people think the most important films to see in HD are big action films, even though explosions, movement blur, constant cutting and shaky camera actually hide lower resolution issues more than any kind of footage.  In fact, steady and languid shots that stay focused on close-ups of fine detail are where you're really going to notice unwanted compression.  But fine, Mr. Stubborn, you still insist you're fine with just standard def for dramas and comedy.  Even then, you're not going to be okay with the US option and you'll need to import a region 2 DVD.

Marleen Gorris is probably best known for her previous film, Antonia's Line.  That's the one that won the Academy Award.  Well, I haven't seen it since the 90s, and I remember it being a good movie, but my recollection is that it was pretty schmaltzy from an era where critics seemed to be singling out charming, cutesy foreign films along the lines of Like Water For Chocolate, Amelie, Little Voice, Chocolat, A Very Long Engagement and so on.  Maybe that's not fair; I haven't seen it in decades, and it's not like I'm trying to say those movies suck.  My point simply is: Mrs. Dalloway is not that.  If you're not super familiar with Virigina Woolf, you could be forgiven for expecting just another feathery, period romance, like Notting Hill for grandmothers starring hopelessly out of touch British aristocrats.  No.  The very first scene is a graphic, slow-motion depiction of a man being blown apart by a landmine, as if Morris is specifically saying to us: whatever delicate little box you've got this movie pigeonholed into, my film is not that.

Mrs. Dalloway, the film and the character, is packed with complicated layers.  Even the structure of the film is bouncing around three disparate stories, seeking out their unexpected connections.  A romanticized past, and an anything but romanticized present filled with regret and thoughts of a life lived wrong, and then a contemporaneous young WWI soldier suffering extreme PTSD returned to a genteel London.  The first is a young and wealthy Mrs. Dalloway and her friends, unwittingly making decisions that would set the course for the rest of their lives.  Then Vanessa Redgrave plays the Mrs. Dalloway who's lived out those decisions, now lost in revery and indecision for over what might have been, her greatest potential now being in a dinner party she endlessly frets over.  Will anyone attend?  All that's put into perspective when she observes Rupert Graves at the end of his rope, permanently traumatized by the sides of life she's never had to acknowledge in her carefully shielded experiences.

Perhaps inspired by Emma Thompson's break out success with Sense & Sensibility, not to mention her own involvement in the development of Upstairs Downstairs, Mrs. Dalloway's screenplay was actually penned by actress Eileen Atkins.  There's plenty of terrific, ever-reliable supporting players including Robert Hardy, Alan Cox, Cersei Lannister herself Lena Headey and a particularly sympathetic Michael Kitchen.  And it's all set to an unforgettable theme, with elegantly photographed English locations.

Mrs. Dalloway debuted on DVD back in 1999 from Fox Lorber Films, and if you're a regular on this site, you've probably learned to wince at DVDs that date as far back as the 90s.  They tend to be pretty grubby, and this is no exception.  I'm talking about non-anamorphic widescreen, the whole bit.  First Look reissued it in 2004, but unfortunately it's the same transfer in new packaging.  Meanwhile, over in Region 2 Land, Artificial Eye released a properly anamorphic edition with a little making of doc and the whole bit in 2003.  And that's been the whole story until the HD age, when one country released it on blu, Germany, courtesy of Alive and Alamode Film in 2013.  Of course, you know what region that makes it.

1) First Look DVD; 2) Artificial Eye DVD; 3) Alive BD.

Firstly, this might be a good time to throw in a reminder that a non-anamorphic DVD isn't just annoying for the extreme window-boxing, and the way it makes modern players distort its aspect ratio.  A non-anamorphic widescreen DVD is inherently lower resolution.  So while a DVD generally sits at 720x480 pixels, in this particular case, it has been shrunk down to 535x293, in order to fit the film's proper aspect ratio into the fullscreen box.  And if those numbers seem a bit off, that's because they still don't get the AR exactly right, coming in at 1.82:1.  Artificial Eye's disc not only doesn't have the non-anamorphic issues, it widens out the image to 1.86:1, most noticeably adding more picture on the left.  You'll notice only AE's disc has an extra tower to the building behind them in the second set of shots.  But there's a bit more on the left as well.  It seems to be slightly horizontally squished, however, since Alive widens the image a tad further, to 1.87:1, but still loses that extra info on the sides.  Frankly, they're all slightly off, and a fancy new restoration could probably fit all that info and slivers more into a proper 1.85:1; but these framings are serviceable enough.

Meanwhile, each disc climbs in resolution.  Alive's blu looks like an old master, with only sporadic film grain and a bit of softness to it.  But it's certainly clearer and sharper than AE's DVD, which in turn preserves more detail than First Look's.  The colors also become increasingly less faded, with First Look appearing particularly low contrast with decidedly gray blacks.  The blu is single-layered, 1080p.

All three discs feature a fine Dolby stereo mix.  The back of the blu-ray case has the DTS Master Audio logo, and all the websites seem to credit this disc with DTS-HD, but what's on the disc itself seems to actually be a lossy AC3 encode.  None of the releases offer English subs either, so if you need those, tough luck.  First Look does, however, throw in Spanish subtitles, and Alive naturally has German, along with a complete German 5.1 dub, which is also in AC3.  So, no, that doesn't explain the DTS thing either.  😕

Extras are nothing special, but not nothing at all.  First Look just has the trailer, but Artificial Eye has the trailer plus a fifteen minute 'making of' featurette.  It's promotional and nothing amazing, but it's genuinely informative and worth the watch, catching interviews with many of the cast and crew filmed on location.  Thankfully, Alive keeps the featurette, but despite promising the trailer on the case, loses it, instead only offering a bunch of bonus trailers.  But the featurette's the main thing; as long as that's present, I'm happy.  AE's DVD also includes reversible artwork, and technically so does Alive, as they do that typical German thing, where the reverse is the same thing minus the garish ratings square.

So as you can see, it's not the most amazing blu-ray in the world.  But I think the odds of this getting a fancy 4k restoration are pretty low, and this is the best we've got.  More to the point, however, the US DVD is intolerably poor.  So if you care about this film (and you should), you've got to break those region 1/A chains.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 5: Butcher Boys

Have you ever wondered what was up with that secret "conspiracy" society of weirdos who randomly turn up at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4 (a.k.a. Next Generation)? I think "who the heck are they?" was a pretty universal reaction to that left-field plot twist. But I don't think a lot of people know, even TCM fans, that Kim Henkel - the writer and director of Chainsaw 4, and co-writer of the 1978 original - actually answered all of that in a follow-up film in 2012. Because the Texas Chainsaw rights seem to be with those Platinum Dunes guys for the remakes, Butcher Boys is not an official TCM movie in name. But it is absolutely, 100% the next chapter in the story, and Henkel wants us to know that.

Let me make the case for it, in case anybody doubts. Set in Texas, Butcher Boys tells the story of a group of teens who unwittingly cross paths with a pack of modern day sadistic cannibals who yes, pack a chainsaw. Those cannibals turn out to work out for a much larger, totally demented group with a secret purpose, which naturally includes turning people into food. When we get to their lair (where the film really takes off), there's one huge, nonverbal burly guy in the dark with something over his face. He's so totally Leatherface (that's him on the cover), except they don't actually call him Leatherface. You might say, oh it's not a real TCM film if there isn't a scene where the family ties the lead girl to a chair at the dinner table and has an insane domestic dispute while eating someone, because they repeated that in every single one of 'em... Well, minor spoiler - that's in the movie! And there are a ton of cameos by Chainsaw alumni, including:

Marilyn Burns, star of the original and who also cameo'd in TCM4
Teri McMinn, Pam from the original
Edwin Neal, the infamous hitchhiker in the original Chainsaw
Perry Lorenz, stuntman and pick-up driver from the 1974 original
Ed Guinn, truck driver from the original
Levie Isaacks, the radio announcer from the original and cinematographer of TCM4
John Dugan, the grandfather in the original and who also cameo'd in TCM4
Bill Johnson, Leatherface in Chainsaw 2
Bill Wise, Heckler from Next Generation

...And maybe even more that I missed. Henkel is clearly trying to signal Chainsaw fans here. He can't say it's Chainsaw 5, but it is. It's not even a recent screenplay. He updated it a bit, but this was written all the way back in 1995. It even says "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in big letters right on the cover and poster, thanks to that "from the writer/producer of" credit.

Besides just being another Texas Chainsaw, I actually think this is an underrated little film with an undeservedly bad rep. The film admittedly starts pretty slow. Nearly the first half of the film is four annoying teens being chased by a pack of "pretty boy" sadists. That admittedly drags on, but I still like how it's not afraid to get darker and more serious than most horror films. It's when we meet the rest of the "family," however, that the film takes off and gets fully gonzo, building to an over-the-top finale that goes far beyond any of the other films in the series. One of my favorite moments is when the father of one of the victims covers his entire body in butter so he can fit into a big crack in the wall where his daughter was taken. It's so insane; I kinda love it.

Before I oversell anybody too much on this film. though, I will say that a lot of people hated Chainsaw 4, and if you're one of those people, this won't turn you around. Everything there was to dislike about that one (and believe me, I see it) is here, too. Again, this film drags a lot for the first half. And the way the teens are written and directed is so obnoxiously unlikable, it's easy to be blinded by animosity towards the merits of the film. Inspired by Jonathan Swift's satirical essay A Modest Proposal, this film also drifts into some real absurdity, which I quite liked, but will probably turn off most conventional slasher fans looking for another entry in a popular franchise. There are also a few cases of the "unfortunate CGI"s due to the film's low-budget you're going to have to overlook. So I wouldn't even necessarily recommend this to people who just generally consider themselves fans of the Chainsaw series overall. But if you liked Next Generation, you should definitely not miss out on this movie. 

 

I really like the look of this film; it feels like the Texan Nightcrawler. And the shot-on-digital footage is served quite well by this HD presentation. There's not a lot you can do to screw up a new digital film's transfer, and fortunately they don't go out of their way to do so here. Everything looks exactly as it should. The film is in its original 1.78:1 aspect ratio, and there's no interlacing, ghost frames or any problems.

Wait, is he wearing the prom dress of the girl from TCM 4?

The blu-ray is perfectly English friendly. Yeah, it has the German dub in HD DTS 5.1, but it still has the original English audio in HD DTS 5.1 as well. And while it says it's region B on the back of the case, I just played it on my region A-locked player. The only thing we miss out on is the theatrical trailer, which is only available with the German dub; but that's an inconsequential price to pay for getting the film in HD.

That trailer is about it for extras, though (the US DVD doesn't have any either). The only other stuff on this disc is a collection of bonus trailers for: Junkie, Hunting Season, Kaliber 9, Home Sweet Home, Rites of Spring, Compliance, Sin Nombre - Life Without Hope, Antisocial, Sickle and Stalled. It has some pretty sweet packaging, though, with reversible artwork to hide the giant, unattractive "FSK 18" ratings symbol, and instead of the standard blue blu-ray case, it comes in a solid black one.

I'm surprised how little recognition this film seems to receive for the Chainsaw film it is, even by the fans: Ironically, a lot of online commenters call it a TCM rip-off. I do understand some people not liking this film, though. Henkel's Next Generation was already the most controversial in the series; and this film doubles down on all of that. This film is the picture of Not For Everybody, but I do wish it would find its audience. The lame Butcher Boys title doesn't help. But there's something of value here, guys; I shouldn't be the only one to see it.