Rating: ****

Compilations, like good horror villains, don’t stay dead. You can chop them, burn them, and kick their ass into a parallel universe — but they always come back. And like good horror movies, which live on in sequels, so too can you reissue, remake, and repurpose soundtrack compilations. It’s appropriate then [...]

Rating: ***

While guzzling (light) beer and smashing potato chips into my face while I rock out to The Final Destination (in the interest of journalism), it’s interesting comparing Brian Tyler’s main titles (“The Final Destination”) with Shirley Walker’s for the first film (simply titled Final Destination). The FD film series truly has morphed into [...]

Rating:****

For some reason I always forget about Laurence Rosenthal. I have a few of his CDs and they’re excellent, but I only seem to remember how good he is when I stumble across one of his albums out of the blue. Take Lala Land’s (sadly out of print) release of The Island of [...]

Rating: ***

Dragonball Evolution is a film that you’ve probably already forgotten based on a tv-show/videogame/toy/merchandising empire from Japan. I know it is as the show that’s occasionally on Cartoon Network late at night when I’m hoping for a rerun of Pinky and the Brain. I’m sure if I sat through an episode I’d [...]

Rating: ***

As near as I can tell, Red Riding is a British miniseries about Yorkshire serial killings in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It is definitely not a direct adaptation of a fairy tale about a little girl who gets eaten by a wolf. I checked. However, it does feature music from three [...]

Review of the Star Trek soundtrack album by Michael Giacchino.

Rating: *** 1/2

In my 2007 review for Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, I posed what I thought was a rather straightforward question: “What could be more bad-ass than a guy who goes out of his way to hunt vampires, right?” At the time, I assumed that the obvious answer was: “Nothing – nothing could be [...]

Rating: ** 1/2

There are few composers working today who have garnered as little goodwill from film music enthusiasts as Tyler Bates. For some (many?) reason(s), he’s become a favorite target to hurl message board missives of fetishistic fanboy derision. His last few major scoring efforts have failed to ignite a passionate fire of [...]

Rating: *** 1/2

Rachel Portman gets a lot of shit from the film music community, and much of it she doesn’t deserve. For some reason, when someone like John Williams scores multiple Sci-Fi adventure fantasies with the same set of stylistic devices back-to-back, most of us don’t raise a word of criticism – in fact we [...]

Rating: ****

It sort of staggers me that Elmer Bernstein always gets credit for being the first person to score comedy as though it were drama when John Morris did just that for earlier films that were just as famous and influential. In particular, I think of his scores for Mel Brooks three best films, The [...]