I love this core and tossed my boot as soon as it hit my mailbox. It's funny. I know Rsoenman could be repetitive upon occasion alright, most fot he time with his dum dum dum dum and tone pyramids, but you what, they worked. I love 'em and would probably miss them if they weren't there. Now how about THE CAR and RACE WITH DEVIL???Race With The Devil, great score! I agree bring it out. Yeah, Rosenman loves those tone pyramids (me too), but how about those variations at the end of Prophecy and Fantastic Voyage. At the end of A Man Called Horse, it sounded as if he was building up another pyramid and surprise, flat.
Man this has some of the most aggressive music I've ever heard in a film score and I love it! Rosenman has really gone into hyper drive here with his usual virtuosic orchestral writing and dazzling orchestrations beefed up even more by the addition of the blaster beam.
Does anyone know the full list of the orchestral instruments employed? I'm asking because it sounds like he might be using the rarely used contrabass trombone which can sound very much like a "tuba with a growl".
The sound in this release is superb. It's a raucous score, very entertaining.
I listened to a clip and it was awful scary, most darned scary music I did hear, and I did hear that Exorcist stuff. My imaginations with this has me cowering all about the place now. Those freaky bears could be anywhere.
Getting a lot of play out of this baby. Makes me want to build a blaster beam and put it in the middle of my living room (it's 25 feet across). I'm sure my wife wouldn't mind...
Here's another one just in, which I had put off getting due to... getting other things (or not getting anything). What a bloody great score! You can never mistake Rosenman, and I actually buy most of his stuff because it all sounds the same. And so this is another whoppingly great Rosenman treat! Love all that chattering, overlapping cacophony like in LORD OF THE RINGS, the obligatory tone pyramids etc... it's all so incredibly intense.
Most impressed also by the grandiose treatment of the "vast outdoors". That's just beautiful. And the Blaster Beam is pretty damn scary! It reminded me more of Rosenman's own "mind-zapping" effects in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES than Goldsmith's use of it for ST:TMP. That's Rosenman for you. Always true to himself. 10 out of 10, brilliant. And fun too! A belated thanks to the FSM team for this.
The first half is a whole lot less of "the usual Rosenman" than I would have expected to hear from this time period. There's even a little EAST OF EDEN-ish writing.
Now please somebody: Rosenman's MURDER IN TEXAS (1981)! That had some cool manipulation of source music that doesn't deserve to get buried.
My appreciation of this film grows with each subsequent viewing of it. I first saw it at the cinema, as a teenager and passed it off as just another dumb, average monster movie. There was so much better horror stuff hitting around the same time, for this one to make any lasting impression on me. I watched it again, on a rare TV screening, about 7...maybe even 10 years ago. And I quite enjoyed it, despite some unintentional comedy moments and a real lack of tension or terror attacks. But it looks great and really has that tremendous 70s outdoors feel about it. And the cast give it a real good go, despite a weak script and some clumsy edits. And where to start about Leonard Rosenman's fantastic score! His inimitable style really does apply a rich, glossy sheen to the (oftentimes) silliness that's going on. It's just tremendous film music. From the warm, great outdoors moments, to the all out horror and suspense scoring, with added Blaster Beam to great effect. And even if it doesn't really have a strong main theme. Just check out the scene - towards the end - when the remaining characters are driving a jeep over rocks, at night, by headlamp and torchlight. NOW THAT'S HOW TO AID A NOTHING SCENE WITH MUSIC!! There's only about 20 minutes of music during the first 75 minutes of the film and then the same amount during the last 25. It's rushed ending is a real bummer, with unresolved character outcomes and a silly stinger finale. And I could do without mopey faced Talia Shire too. Did she ever have another facial gesture! She acts permanently constipated. But I like it overall and who knows how I'll rate it on my 4th viewing.
The whole film is free to view on YouTube, in decent quality too...
I'm not going to say this movie is good - but its a damn lot of fun. What was with these ourdoor adventure "Man against Nature run amok" stuff in the 70s? You had this and Day Of The Animals and a few others like it. Grizzly maybe, or was that the 80s?
I don't really have anything to add to this except the commercials and reviews I saw in '79 told me I didn't need to see it.
And when I've caught a few moments on TV in the subsequent decades, it never held my interest. I'm gonna have to give it a try one day. It's one of the very few Frankenheimer films I've never seen.
And yes, I love the Rosenman score - and hell, I watched The Car finally when that score came out, so what excuse have I? It can't be worse than that.
But the real reason I'm posting is that this thread got me to listen to the soundtrack, and when I opened iTunes, I noticed that Leroy Anderson's Christmas album is nestled right next to my coo-coo Rosenman soundtracks. That's a pair of uncomfortable bedfellows.
