His Name Was Jason: The Redux?

Fans were at a fever pitch when it was announced that the Friday the 13th film franchise was going to be receiving a proper documentary covering every single film that had been released. It had never been done before and understandably would be difficult to pull off considering the rights to the film property had shifted to New Line Cinema from Paramount. However, with Peter Bracke's book Crystal lake Memories and David Grove's book Making Friday the 13th, groundwork was laid to create the ultimate Friday the 13th video documentary.

So how did the documentary, His Name Was Jason, fair upon its release? Overall, fans enjoyed the cast and crew recounting their experiences on the respective films. Tom Savini did a great job narrating the audience through the different sections of the main documentary. The individual bonus materials featuring the people who played Jason as well as the filmmakers themselves was all very satisfying. However, there is that feeling among many in the community that there was something missing.

Some of what was missing was found in the Deluxe Edition DVD releases of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Friday the 13th Part 8; Jason Takes Manhattan. The deleted scenes and blooper reels really gave fans a behind the scenes look at what was going on through the filming process of those movies and it is believed that is the main fault of the His Name Was Jason documentary. It seemed to many fans that the documentary regurgetated a lot of information already given in the books written by Peter Bracke and David Grove. That is not to take away anything from the very hard work put into the production of the documentary. It is a great reference for fans. That being said, the Nightmare on Elm Street documentary, Never Sleep Again, set the bar very high and now is the benchmark for horror film documentaries.

The reason why the Nightmare doco probably resonated with fans in a better way is that the production team was dealing with all of the films created and distributed by one company, New Line Cinema. Archived film reels and photos were much easier to come by and there were no rights issues to deal with for including these types of materials on the documentary. Overall, the Friday the 13th documentary may have suffered a little bit by not being able to highlight behind the scenes materials from all of the films in the franchise, but it still is a solid entry for fans.

The question has been raised in the past two years, should there be a new documentary, including all of the behind the scenes material collected from the 2005 DVD box set along with the 2009 Deluxe Edition DVD's and His Name Was Jason Documentary? Would pooling all of these materials together into one deifnitive documentary matter to fans or is what we have now all we need?