Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

Soundtrack Review: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) - Music by John Massari

Killer Klowns from Outer Space is one of the great 80s monster movies.  One that, despite a supposedly off putting title and concept, manages to be both funny (they're clowns, after all) and frightening.  Or disturbing, at least. The monsters themselves are beautifully balanced between being goofy (they're clowns, after all) and monstrously nightmarish. (They're clowns, after all - just ask anyone with coulrophobia.)

The film's story is The Blob retold with alien "klowns," instead of a growing chunk of carnivorous gelatinous goo.  Mike (Grant Cramer) takes his new girlfriend Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) to "The Top of the World," the local make-out spot for their small town's youth.  A falling star interrupts their playful romance and the couple investigate.  What they discover is a circus tent that is, in fact, an alien spaceship.  One that is filled with people eating klowns.  Mike and Suzanne narrowly escape being cocooned by the klowns' cotton candy food storage guns and try to convince the local police that their goofy tale is true.  Meanwhile the klowns march into town for some dinner.

Playing underneath it all is John Massari's wonderful electronic score.  On the liner notes for Varese Sarabande's Limited Edition album of Jerry Goldsmith's unused score for 1988's Alien Nation, writer Robert Townson had this to say about electronic film scores:

"Electronic scores were all the rage in the 80s and, by and large, resulted in one long drone.  There was little of interest among the vast majority of these works, as it didn't take much expertise to make sounds on them.  But to make music it still took the talent of a real composer."

John Massari is a real composer, and his score for Killer Klowns from Outer Space is top notch.  While the campy theme song by The Dickies (also included on the album) is probably what sticks in the memory of the average viewer; those, like me, that pay attention to the music score for a movie will know that John Massari's score was perfectly suited for Klown's goofy/creepy style. 

The Killer Klown March, first heard when the aliens begin their march on the town, just after Mike and Suzanne make their escape, will be the easiest to recall for the casual listener.  It is also heard during several subsequent attacks, though it may have been a loop, as some of the attack music doesn't appear on the album.  The only other times the March is heard on the album is in Visit to the Drugstore and, my favorite version, Amusement Park/Death Pies.  ("What are you going to do with those pies, boys?")

What makes a good score great is its ability to enhance a film, not draw attention to itself.  Mike and Debbie's Discovery is an almost seven minute long track that, in the film, plays throughout Mike and Debbie finding the clown ship, first mistaking it for an actual circus tent, then discovering the horrifying truth about it and its inhabitants.  Massari goes from playful to threatening with ease, calling attention to itself only when dramatically necessary.  The same can be said for Escape from the Klown Ship, the track that immediately follows.

Galactic Globe Theatre underscores a playful puppet show that turns into a death trap.  Again Massari splendidly punctuates Klown's method of starting with humor and ending with horror.  Little Girl Too Klose is a wonderful suspense cue for one of the film's most haunting moments.  Shadow Show again shows just how expertly Massari is at punctuating Klown's joke-turned-jab style.  (This track is probably one of the album's very best at showing Massari's skill as a composer - though Growing Korn is a personal favorite, because it features a Carpenteresque staccato to goose the suspense.)

Other tracks worth mentioning are Officer Mooney (wherein the late, great John Vernon comes face-to-nose with a Klown), Dave and the Aftermath, Ventriloquist Mooney, The Inevitable Parts 1 and 2 (heard when a procession of Klowns marches down a street, capturing and sucking up any and all humans unfortunate to be there), and Truck Escape and Klownzilla (actually any of the music that underscores the film's climax is excellent).

While John Massari's music blends so well with the movie it is scoring that it might be hard to remember or notice during the movie itself, the simple fact that it did its job so well is what makes it such a wonderful listening experience.  The music is so well connected to its source that even hearing it separated from the film, it easy to recall exactly where the music was used.  I think that is a pretty high compliment and I also think that John Massari's score for Killer Klowns from Outer Space is one of 80s film music's hidden gems.  A big thanks to Percepto Records for finally getting it out on CD, it was worth every second of the wait.

Soundtrack Review: Ghosts of Mars (2001) - Music by John Carpenter

When it comes to his film scores, John Carpenter's career can be separated into three distinct phases.

The first is best described as his Classic Era.  Working in what Carpenter called "double-blind mode" (no visual reference to, thus being unable to synchronize the music with, the actual movie) with his creative consultant Dan Wyman, Carpenter crafted the simplistic, yet incredibly potent, scores that rank as his most memorable.  The Classic Era scores are Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog.  (I don't include Carpenter's score for Dark Star for the simple reason that it was not a professional film, but an expanded student project.)

Next comes The Howarth Era, which encapsulates Carpenter's scores through the 1980s.  While the music for Escape From New York and Halloween II seemed to have been composed in "double-blind" mode, everything after those two seemed to utilize a synchronized "play it to TV" method.  Alan Howarth described the method in the liner notes for the Halloween III: The Season Of The Witch soundtrack:

"The film is first transferred to a time coded video tape and synchronized to a 24-track master audio recorder; then while watching the film we compose the music to these visual images.  The entire process goes quite rapidly and has "instant gratification," allowing us to evaluate the score in synch to the picture."

The result of this new method was a drifting away from the stark, staccato themes of Carpenter's earlier work with Dan Wyman.  The scores of the Howarth Era, Halloween III, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live are more impressionistic, invoking mood through a complex tonal tapestry rather than via a collection of simplistic and repetitious themes.

The third and, to date, final Carpenter "Era" is what I call the Hodgepodge, because Carpenter's composing partners have changed with each film.  Having broken ties with Alan Howarth after They Live, Carpenter hired Shirley Walker to compose an orchestral score for his 1990 film Memoirs of an Invisible Man. (It was the first of his movies since 1982's The Thing to have such a score.)  Carpenter returned to the composing keyboard, assisted by Jim Lang, for his next film, In The Mouth Of Madness.  Dave Davies assisted with the composing chores for Village Of The Damned, while Shirley Walker returned for Escape From L.A.  Carpenter hired several well known rock and blues musicians and formed an actual band, The Texas Toad Lickers, to flavor up his score for Vampires.  The approach worked so well that Carpenter brought in another crew of musicians, this time from the heavy metal section, for his next score, Ghosts of Mars.

Film music exists to enhance a visual story.  Being able to enjoy the music outside of the film, as its own stand alone composition, is a statement to the quality of the composer's work, more-so than of the film the work was composed for.  (Jerry Goldsmith was well known for giving terrible movies wonderful, if not out and out classic, music.)  While the Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre as a whole is filled with memorable themes, sadly the music for Ghosts of Mars is not.  If fact, it doesn't play all that well outside of the movie it was composed for. 

It has been over a year, perhaps even two, since I last watched John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars.  While listening to its soundtrack over and over again this past week, I seriously considered watching the movie again, just so I could place the music I was listening to into some kind of context.  Of its twelve tracks, there are only two that I can actually place in the film from memory, the rest of it just sounds like a bunch of metal musicians jamming to Carpenter's simplistic keyboard arrangements.  If you like that kind of music, and I don't, then, maybe, this soundtrack might turn out to be a good investment.

Track #1: Ghosts of Mars.  This is the film's Opening Credit theme, playing as a seemingly abandoned train travels over the desolate landscape of Mars.  It's a six-note rhythm, clearly invoking the repetitious rattle of a train's wheels rolling over the tracks, decorated with ominous tones and melodies that hint something bad has either happened on the train, or is hiding in it.  The mood changes about two minutes in, when Steve Vai cuts loose on the guitar.

Track #2: Love Siege.  Judging by its quiet opening and then percussive build-up to the pounding guitar thrashing of Buckethead, Robin Finck, and Scott Ian, my guess is that the music plays over the intro to some serious ass-kicking.  (Though it is hard, at times, to figure out who is kicking who.)

Track #3: Fight Train.  This track, along with Ghosts of Mars, is the only one that I can place in the film.  Tough as nails Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Hestridge) and Snake Pliss..uh...I mean, Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) face down Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone) and a few other Martian possessed zombies.  Fight Train opens, as did Love Siege, with some ominous keyboard work from Carpenter (which plays under Ballard searching a supposedly deserted train car).  That doesn't last long, though.  A zombie pops out and the fighting begins.  The best thing about this track is Charlie Benante's excellent drum work.  At key moments he cuts loose, pounding out a rhythm that, like the slower Ghosts of Mars, invokes the steady beat of a fast moving train.

Track #4: Visions of Earth.  Coming off of two rather hard hitting action cues, Visions of Earth is a change of pace.  It's a soft, almost gentle piece that, like Ghosts and Train, contains the distinct rhythm of the train that plays an important role in the story.  So I figure it to be early in the film, when Ballard and the other Mars Colonial Police Force troops are en route (via train) to the isolated town jail that supposedly holds the wanted criminal Desolation Williams.  At the two minute mark the tone changes, which seems to be a moment when Ballard sneaks in a hit of some kind of synthetic designer drug.  After that interlude, the cue returns to its pulsing, gentle rhythm.

Track #5: Slashing Void.  At one point Ballard becomes possessed by a Martian spirit spore (don't ask) and, thanks to Jericho Butler (Jason Statham) giving her a farewell does of the synthetic designer drug she is hooked on, Ballard has a vision of the previous inhabitants prior to her body rejecting the spore.  This music seems a good fit for that scene, but I don't know for sure.

Track #6: Kick Ass.  As the title of this track so subtly puts it, this is an action cue.  There is a two minute build-up before the track really cuts loose, but it could go anywhere in the movie, which is filled with fights using both gun and fist.

Track #7: Power Station.  This location plays an important part in the latter half of the film, with the characters fighting their way to get to, then away from, it.  The cue could be playing at any point in those action packed scenes.

Track #8: Can't Let You Go.  Considering the tone of the track, I'm pretty sure it underscores a scene that addresses the constantly changing relationship between Ballard and Desolation.  She's a cop and he's a criminal, so she can't let him go.  Get it?

Track #9: Dismemberment Blues.  This is one of the soundtrack's darkest and most distinctly John Carpenter tracks.  I'm pretty sure it underscores the sequence wherein the mining camp inhabitants are infected with the Martian spores, then turn on, and slaughter, those in the camp that were uninfected.

Track #10: Fightin' Mad.  Yeah, it's another action cue, how'd you manage to guess that?  But, like Dismemberment Blues, it is a piece that is distinctly Carpenter's.

Track #11: Pam Grier's Head.  Now I could be wrong (it has been known to happen), but I'm thinking that this cue is for when Jericho finds the head of Commander Braddock (Pam Grier, natch) impaled on the top of a stick.  Can't really call it a spoiler, what with the track title being about as clear about a decapitation as it can be.

Track #12: Ghost Poppin'.  Well, if you going to pop some ghosts, then what better way than to have heavy metal guitars thrashing in the background?

As with just about everything Carpenter has done since Halloween III: The Season Of The Witch, the music for Ghosts of Mars lacks a unifying structure or dominant theme.  The music is more impressionistic, invoking the mood of a particular scene rather than creating a theme or motif to characterize the film as a whole.  This is probably due to the fact that Carpenter is still using the "play it to TV" method to compose his scores.  Not helping is that so much of the score feels buried under thrashing guitars.  I can only recommend this soundtrack to those that like to scrunch their faces into one of those "Damn, these roids itch!" expressions while playing air guitar. Those wanting a memorable score from a memorable movie need to look somewhere else, it isn't here.

Soundtrack Review: The Fog (1980) - Music Composed and Performed by John Carpenter

Is it too much to ask, when releasing a soundtrack album of music from a film, that it contain the music actually used in the film?

When Varese Sarabande finally released a soundtrack album for John Carpenter's The Fog back in the mid 1980s, I was thrilled.  John Carpenter's subtle and spooky score for his 1980 follow up to his 1978 hit, Halloween, is my personal favorite of all his work.  When I finally heard the album, the disappointment was crushing.  Only a handful of the tracks sounded like anything from the score I knew and loved, the rest were a bunch of clumsy remixes and, even worse, there was stuff on the album that wasn't even in the movie.  Had Varese Sarabande gotten the "heavy handed and obvious" score that Carpenter mentioned in his liner notes by mistake?  That would explain the missing gaps in the score's presentation.

Then, ten or fifteen years later, Silva America released a "new expanded edition" of Carpenter's score, and my hopes were again raised, only to be dashed once more.  Silva America did manage to include some music that was recognizable from the film, but, as was the case with the Varese Sarabande album, a large portion of the new material were irritating remixes of used and unused cues.

Track #1: Prologue narrated by John Houseman.  Varese Sarabande claimed that one of the things that kept a soundtrack album for The Fog being released during its original theatrical run was an inability to secure the rights for Houseman's splendid opening story to be included.  I guess all that got cleared up.  I would have preferred the music cue to play in its entirety, rather than getting lopped off when Houseman's story begins and ends.  It would have set a better tone for the album to come.

Track #2: Theme from The Fog.  This is a five minute remix of The Fog's end title theme, cluttered up with needless stingers (the shock cues heard whenever the ghosts lunged out of either the fog itself, or a darkened doorway).  It also goes on far too long, wearing out its welcome at about the three minute mark.

Track #3: Matthew Ghost Story.  Who the hell is Matthew?  There wasn't any character named Matthew in The Fog.  The proper title for this track should be Machen's Ghost Story, as it is the haunting melody that plays over the AVCO Embassy logo, Machen's yarn, and the film's title credit.  When this track started the Varese Sarabande album, I almost sighed with the pleasure of hearing it.  When the tackiness of Theme from The Fog followed it, my reaction became "...the hell?"

Track #4: Walk to the Lighthouse.  This is probably one of The Fog's best and most memorable cues, heard when Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) arrives at her lighthouse turned radio station and, at the end of the film, when the fog retreats and Wayne gives her memorable speech.  This three line melody (a high flute, a mid-range counterpoint, and a low bass support) is Carpenter's favorite.

Track #5: Rocks At Drake's Bay.  This opens with the bell/harpsichord 'round' (which doubles as the Theme from The Fog) that plays over Andy's finding the driftwood and returning home to share his discovery with his mom, Stevie Wayne.  Following it is a quick reprise of the opening melody, which I believe is heard just after Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) tells Mrs. Williams (Janet Leigh), "I have something to show you."  After that is a sample of music that was unused in the film, which is good.  Because it's terrible and shatters the mood built by Walk to the Lighthouse and Rocks at Drake's Bay first two segments.

Track #6: The Fog.  Humming, thumping, and bumping music.  Three minutes and fifteen seconds of it, and not a bit of it used in the film.  It has to be more of that "heavy handed and obvious" stuff, because it sure sounds like it.

Track #7: Antonio Bay.  Just after Dick Baxter's body collapses onto an unsuspecting Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), a portion of this track's bass rhythm is heard as Father Malone finishes reading his Grandfather's journal to Mrs. Williams and Sandy.  It's a great cue.  Here it is dragged out for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, after a haunting variation of the bell/harpsichord 'round' sets the mood.  That variation is not used in the movie, but it would have fit rather nicely in a scene or two.

Track #8: Tommy Tells of Ghost Ships.  Okay, who the hell is Tommy?  First Matthew, now Tommy.  Did anyone that worked on these soundtracks even see the movie?  Nick tells Elizabeth of a ghost ship, and I am pretty sure that the music heard here was not used in that scene.  The opening segment of the track actually sounds like the music heard at the bridge of the film's second and third act, when Nick (Tom Atkins), Dr. Phibes (Darwin Joston) and Elizabeth see that Dick Baxter's briefly revived corpse had written the number 3 on the floor with a scalpel.  The cue continues over a montage of the Point Reyes region at dusk, the mournful bleat of a foghorn moaning across the landscape.  Following that is a brief and unwelcome reprise of Track Six's stupid humming, thumping, and bumping.

Track #9: Reel 9.  The opening is a mix of some humming synthesizers (some of which 'sounds' like it was in the film) mixed with those ghost lunging stingers, many of which sound like they are looped from the scene where Nick rescues Andy and the ghosts shamble toward his stranded truck.  About three minutes in another familiar, and my favorite, cue from The Fog begins.  This is a bell/heartbeat round driven by rising and falling tones.  It plays while the fog rolls into town and Nick, Elizabeth, Mrs. Williams and Sandy all flee to Father Malone's church.  It's a great cue, too bad it's cluttered up with needless stingers that constantly interrupt the flow of the music.

So far the Silva release has just been a reissue of Varese Sarabande's disappointing soundtrack album.  Only Track #1 is anything new, Tracks 2 - 9 are just the Varese Sarabande album in a slightly different order.  (Matthew Ghost Story came before Theme from 'The Fog', not after)  So all my hopes for a restored soundtrack for The Fog hinged on what Tracks 10 - 13 contained.

Track #10: Main Theme - Reprise.  Ah, The Fog's end title theme as heard in the movie, almost.  I say almost because the track contains only two repetitions of the bell/harpsichord round while the actual end credit theme had three, the third featuring a melodic line.  Still, my hopes were up.

Track #11: The Fog Rolls In.  And my hopes roll out.  This sounds like more of that "heavy handed and obvious" music, not anything from the film.

Track #12: Blake in the Sanctuary.  Argh, yet another remix of cues!  The track opens with several stingers and assorted bric-brac from Reel 9 cluttering up the music heard when Dan the Weatherman (Charles Cyphers) first tells Stevie Wayne about "another fog bank."  Later on the pinging heard when Father Malone carries the gold cross into the Church to confront Blake appears, as does the music that plays under The Fog's "Gotcha!" ending.

Track #13: Finale.  Nothing of the sort.  This is just a reprise of the Second/Third Act Bridge heard in Tommy Tells of Ghost Ships.

Track #14: Radio Interview with Jamie Lee Curtis about The Fog.  Good thing it's about The Fog and not Halloween, or something else off topic.  I'm sorry, but this filler is just a complete waste of time.  If dialog must be included, please have it be from the film.  The KAB Radio station identification at the beginning was nice, but it would have been nicer if it had been followed by some of Stevie Wayne's dialog and, maybe, one of the stock music cues the movie used for KAB's broadcasts.  An album of The Fog's stock music would be quite the collectible, I think.

Still missing are two wonderful tracks, the music that underscores the boarding of the Sea Grass and Mrs. Williams and Sandy drive up to the church, and the cue when the fog rolls over Stevie Wayne's house.  I was really hoping that this (now out of print) "new expanded edition" would at least contain that music.  It does not.  It's just more of the same and, considering how disappointing it was the first time, this needless rehash only makes it doubly so the second.

Soundtrack Review: The Best of Friday the 13th - Music by Harry Manfredini & Fred Mollin

It has been well over twenty years since a soundtrack album of Harry Manfredini's music for the Friday the 13th series has seen any kind of commercial release, which is pretty sad.  Manfredini's score is every bit has well known, and highly regarded among horror film fans, as John Carpenter's music for Halloween and John Williams' theme for Jaws.  The music deserves a soundtrack release of some kind.

In 1982 a compilation of suites of the music for Parts 1, 2 and 3 was released to tie-in with the then current theatrical release of Friday the 13th Part 3 3-D.  The album cover, featuring a hockey mask wearing Jason shattering a window with an axe, was in 3-D, as was the poster of that same artwork included inside, with the necessary glasses, of course.  Track #1, Friday the 13th Part III - Main Title, is the complete disco styled theme that played over Part 3's opening and closing credits.  Track #2, Intro to Horror, starts with the first Friday the 13th's impressive main title theme, then settles down into ten minutes of suspense and action cues.  The album's second side contains two suites of music from Friday the 13th Parts 2 and 3.  Track #3, Excerpts in Terror, starts with Friday the 13th Part 2's some what rougher theme and it closes with a soft and spooky string arrangement of Friday the 13th Part 3's main title melody.  Track #4, Moments of Madness, begins and ends in the same way, but the string arrangement of the Part 3 melody plays as it is heard at the end of the film, a gentle plink disrupting the melody for when a single bubble ripples the placid surface of Crystal Lake.  Madness also features the music in Part 2's famous scene where Ginny (Amy Steel) puts on Mrs. Vorhees's sweater and almost convinces the killer that his mother has finally returned.   Although I was unable to get the album for myself, a friend of mine did and I recorded several tracks off it and proceeded to wear my tape out listening to it over and over.

Finding a CD of Friday the 13th film music (dubbed a "A Limited Archive Edition") at a soundtrack dealer table at the 2005 Wonder Con was a thrill, to say the least.  I recognized the first four tracks as being from the 1982 album, but the disc also contained samplings of Manfredini's music from Friday the 13th Parts 4, 5, 6, and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.  The additional tracks appear to be recorded directly from the films themselves, as some contain sound effects.  Each track also shows the subtle differences in structure and theme Manfredini brought to each score.  (I am disappointed that the first Friday the 13th's gentle jazz end credit theme was not included on this disc.)  Less impressive is Manfredini's work on Jason Goes to Hell, evidently taken from the Varese Sarabande soundtrack album, which is predominantly an electronic score and, being such, lacks the distinctive character of Manfredini's orchestral work for parts one through six.

Rounding out the disc are Alice Cooper's kitsch classic The Man Behind the Mask and, in an odd but welcome inclusion, the equally kitschy Peter Fredette song Darker Side of the Night that played over the opening and ending credits of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.  Since the song was not included on the recently released limited edition album of Fred Mollin's scores for Friday the 13th parts seven and eight I am glad to have it here.  It makes my library feel more complete.  The disc ends with the completely needless theme for the Friday the 13th: The Series television show, composed by Fred Mollin.

While I am glad to have this disc, I do wish that some company would get around to releasing a mainstream one of Manfredini's music, giving it the respect that it deserves.  Until that happens, at least I have this disc to keep me happy.

Soundtrack Review: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) & Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - Music Composed and Performed by Fred Mollin

With the exception of its percussive opening title theme, I did not recall all that much of Fred Mollin's contribution to Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.  "Co-composer" Harry Manfredini's scores for the previous six entries had provided a large enough library of music to cut and paste into about half of The New Blood.  Mollin, who was scoring the first season of the Friday the 13th: The Series television show at the time, was called in to fill the gaps.  Mollin's liner notes describe his work as a "melange of synthetic and sampled sounds to work with the Manfredini orchestral score."  Accurate description, with the exception of a childlike staccato theme, there is nothing about the score that sticks in the memory, even while listening to it.

Writer/director Rob Hedden completely jettisoned the Manfredini score library and asked Mollin, now at work on Friday the 13th: The Series season two, to score the entirety of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes a Boat...uh...Takes Manhattan, I mean.  Working with a tight budget, Mollin delivered another all electronic score, if you can call it that.  Mollin's notes describe the Takes Manhattan score as "a dense foliage of sound that seemed to do the trick," again an accurate description, because it is just a bunch of sound, not music.  Sadly the J-J-J-Jasonjasonjason that plays over the Paramount logo at the beginning of the movie is absent, as is the kitschy pop song "Darker Side Of the Night" that plays over Part VIII's opening and closing credits.

The album itself is just a collection of electronic hums and clangs with a touch of melody creeping in here and there in The New Blood segment.  This is of interest only to Friday the 13th fans, or a horror film music collecting completest.  Being just such a completest, I'm eventually going to get Mollin's music for Friday the 13th: The Series for that very reason, getting this disc was a given.  But it is no replacement for Manfredini's classic scores, which I'm still waiting to see released on CD.

Soundtrack Review: The Kindred (1987) - Music Composed and Conducted by David Newman

The Kindred is the kind of low-budget schlock that doesn’t get released in theatres all that often these days, which is too bad.  The movie is a lot of gooey-goofy fun - that is if you don’t think about it too much.  From her deathbed scientist Amanda Hollins (Kim Hunter) begs her son John (David Allen Brooks) to destroy the notes and records for her last experiment, which seems to have involved a brother named Anthony that John never knew he had.  John, with a group of his friends (each with what producer Richard Zanuck would call a “defining characteristic” - Hollywood speak for a quirk that stands in for any actual character development) and a mysterious woman named Melissa (Amanda Pays), set out for the home of the late Dr. Hollins.  But it is further investigation, not destruction, of that unknown experiment that John and company intend to do.  Meanwhile the evil Dr. Philip Lloyd (Rod Steiger) lurks around, hoping to find out the secret of Anthony and how to best claim it as his own.  Therein ends the portion of the plot that makes any sense whatsoever, the rest off the movie is a bunch of monster attacks (one managing to come from the inside of a watermelon) that build to an over the top finale that has to hold some kind of record for the usage of slime in a movie.  The sets and actors are literally buried in it.

 

Other than the Lullaby, a sweet song that Amanda used to soothe Anthony’s emotional outbursts, I did not remember any of David Newman’s score for The Kindred.  Of course it has been, at the very least, a good fifteen years since I had last seen the movie.  But when Varese Sarabande announced that it would be releasing a limited edition CD of the score, nostalgia and the memory of that gentle Lullaby told me to get one.  I’m glad I did, the disc sold out in one day and, more importantly, the score is an excellent piece of work.

 

Now I am not going to pretend I know anything at all about music, because I don’t.  I am not going to waste time trying to figure out which musical terms or phrases best describe David Newman’s score, because I can’t.  All I can say is that it is an accomplished piece of work that, if memory serves, is far better than the movie it was composed for.  (A situation not uncommon to horror films, truth told.)  The Kindred was only Newman’s third film score, following Vendetta and New Line Cinema’s Gremlins knock-off Critters, but it sounds like the work of someone with a lot more experience in the field.  Newman weaves ideas and themes throughout, the Lullaby becoming Anthony’s Theme, while also managing to go off in the experimental direction that only scoring a horror, science-fiction or fantasy film seems to allow.  I can only hope that Varese Sarabande and other CD companies continue to release these quality genre scores that are so often forgotten.