CD Reviews: Shadow of the Vampire, Twilight Zone The Movie
Shadow Of The Vampire ***
DAN JONES
Pacific Time Entertainment PTE-8531-2
28 tracks - 49:46
E. Elias Merhige's Shadow Of The Vampire is the Ed Wood-like
tale of director F.W. Murnau's attempt to make the classic silent vampire
film Nosferatu. Murnau cast actor Max Schreck to play his vampire
Count Orloff, and apparently "Schreck" in German means "terror." This and
the fact that little is known about the actor (although he does have around
twenty movies listed on the IMDB between 1922, when he made Nosferatu,
and 1935) led to writer Steven Katz's idea that Schreck actually WAS a
vampire cast by the notoriously fastidious director Murnau in order to
achieve the greatest realism.
Dan Jones' score mixes a touch of Bernard Herrmann; a bit of Danny Elfman;
and even a dash of Kilar to create a darkly witty period feeling for the
movie. As an album it's more problematic, mixing bits of dialogue, applause
and laughter in a manner certain to infuriate collectors who bought it
for the music. To be sure, Jones interpolates his effects into the fabric
of the music, sometimes achieving the effect of a half-remembered dream.
And when the score does burst forth unfettered -- as in "Schreck Kills
Peter" -- it's lively and diabolical, with strong brass performances charging
over fierce, knitting strings. Ghostly tones from an ondes martinot and
a Brechtian song ("Herr Doktor") add to the period quality, but with 28
tracks in under 50 minutes it's hard for this album to really get anything
going that you can (you will forgive the impression) sink your teeth into.
-- Jeff Bond
Twilight Zone: The Movie **** 1/2
JERRY GOLDSMITH
Warner Bros. 759 923 887-2
8 tracks - 45:24
You probably won't find a better overview of Jerry Goldsmith's composing
style than his 1983 score to Twilight Zone: The Movie, an ill-fated
attempt to translate Rod Serling's legendary anthology television series
to the big screen. The film was hobbled from the start by the last minute
substitution of an original tale about haunted Halloween masks with a Steven
Spielberg remake of George Clayton Johnson's "Kick the Can," which provided
the movie with a mawkish and bloated midsection. But the production really
hit bottom late in filming of John Landis's segment "Time Out," when actor
Vic Morrow and two children were horribly killed by a crashing helicopter
(one critic noted that the story was "hardly worth seeing, let alone worth
dying for."). The accident left a permanent shadow over the film (and John
Landis' career) from which it never recovered, despite the fact that the
two final segments, Joe Dante's "It's A Good Life" and George Miller's
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" were quite good.
Given this legacy it was unlikely that anyone connected with Twilight
Zone: The Movie was going to win any awards, but Jerry Goldsmith surely
deserved one for his wonderfully eclectic and winning orchestral score.
Of course, Goldsmith had a long history with Serling's original series
and was the perfect choice to score the movie. He responded with four distinctive
mini-scores with little or no thematic connections.
For the grim "Time Out" (with Morrow as a bigot forced to experience
prejudice in other realities) Goldsmith wrote a score that might have been
employed on the original television show, using only percussion, piano
and electronics to create a disjointed, nervous mood. For Spielberg's overproduced
and shamelessly sappy "Kick the Can" Goldsmith pulled out all the stops
and wrote one of his most thematically beautiful scores ever, capturing
both the bright optimism of childhood and the wizened nostalgia of the
aged. This is so far Goldsmith's only direct collaboration with Spielberg
and I doubt John Williams could have done any better in terms of wringing
all possible sentiment out of the story. You may cringe when Scatman Crothers
starts singing at the end, but Goldsmith's gentle accompaniment and deliriously
lyrical denouement is letter-perfect.
The composer seamlessly switches gears to pure horror in Joe Dante's
bizarre "It's A Good Life," about an omnipotent little boy holding his
family in a terrifying alternate reality. Taking his cue from the ancient
cartoons constantly playing on televisions all over monster-boy Anthony's
house, Goldsmith mixes his own dynamic horror style with the diabolical
wit and energy of Carl Stalling, ingeniously capping some unnerving Rob
Bottin monster appearances with the bleat of an old-fashioned car horn,
an effect that makes you grin while your hair stands on end. Trust Goldsmith
to also make sense of Dante's strangely ambiguous ending for the story,
where Kathleen Quinlan finds a way to get the upper hand over the boy in
order to use him for her own ends.
The film's climax is George Miller's fast-paced, harrowing and funny
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which trades the sweaty William Shatner of
the original television story for a frenetic and hilarious John Lithgow
as a terrified air passenger who thinks he sees a gremlin perched on the
wing of the airliner he's flying in. Blending a deft, musical psychological
study with driving action, Goldsmith's music never fails to get a rise
out of the audience, from the first lurching, grinding double bass ostinato
that perfectly establishes the Lithgow character's ragged and paranoid
state of mind to the diabolical, scratchy fiddle theme for the gremlin
itself. The sequence in which Lithgow silently fights the urge to look
out his seat window for fear he'll see the creature again is a miniature
masterpiece of suspense scoring: Goldsmith first seems to soothe the passenger
to sleep with electronics and strings, and then furtively, insidiously
begins to pick and scratch at the man with plucked strings and increasingly
lengthy and urgent phrases from the violin. I saw this movie twice in the
theater and both times audience members were visibly unnerved by Goldsmith's
music.
Everything is wrapped up in an exciting end title overture (it opens
the album) which stands on its own as a fine concert piece (the horn counterline
at the climax of the "Kick the Can" section is wonderful). The one track
most people will be skipping is Jennifer Warnes' single "Nights Are Forever,"
which probably plays on a jukebox somewhere in the film. Goldsmith wrote
the music for the song with lyrics by John Bettis (he also wrote those
great "wringle wrangle" lyrics for Legend), and the song is produced
and arranged by -- James Newton Howard! I doubt this one shows up on any
of their resumes. Twilight Zone: The Movie has been on collectors'
wish lists for years but Warners has been loathe to put the score on CD
domestically -- it took their German division to do it, along with another
Goldsmith masterpiece, Under Fire. Sound quality is superb and while
the packaging is the same minimalist approach the LP took (with a brief
salute to Jerry by Rod Serling's widow Carol), who cares? This CD is a
must-have. -- Jeff Bond
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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