Buy it... only if your taste in classic horror music weights heavily towards the more sparse, electronically rendered style of John Carpenter.

Avoid it... if you expect the album to provide a consistent, effective listening experience (or a solid representation from symphonic horror scores).

Choice Cuts: (Compilation) Released during the season to be frightened, Milan Records' 1999 compilation of score cues and themes contains many of the most popular horror genre film scores of the past twenty years. Ranging from the purely electronic to the hugely orchestral, the "Choice Cuts" album features music from the likes of John Carpenter, Pino Donaggio, Christopher Young, Marco Beltrami, Michael Kamen, Howard Shore, Shirley Walker, Alan Howarth, Nicholas Pike, and Dick Maas. These are cuts, indeed. But choice cuts? That may be the issue that lies at the heart of the album. Even within the horror genre, Milan's choices span a wide variety of styles within the horror genre itself, with each of the chosen selections offering its own virtues. It's easy to see right off the bat that the album was likely created by devoted fans of the 1980's small-budget horror classics, with John Carpenter at the forefront of their attention. The album has a fair collection of work by Carpenter and his usual associates, from the original Halloween to Escape from New York and its sequel, as well as the more recent Vampires. With the work of Carpenter, Howarth, and Walker placed with emphasis, the compilation is predisposed to the more sparse, electronic style that Carpenter's films and music embody, despite the fact that Vampires takes the industrial rock sound to levels Graeme Revell or especially Robert Rodriguez would appreciate. Similar in style to Carpenter's table-setters are Maas' The Lift and Donaggio's Body Double. As a nod to the more symphonic side of the horror genre, the album includes somewhat random horror cues selected from Carrie, The Dead Zone, Scream, Sleepwalkers, and Urban Legend. Howard Shore's extremely unconventional sounds for Crash round out the album with one of the more interesting utilizations of instruments perhaps ever heard in a feature film score, a fan-favorite for many. Ultimately, however, the album fails to create a consistent mood.

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Many of the more mood-associated cues are overwhelmed by neighboring selections of more conventional, slashing symphonic bombast. It wavers without much sense between the conflicting styles representative of Carpenter and Young, fooling you at one moment into believing that the album will be a quietly creepy background experience while making you jump out of your seat at the next moment with a symphonic strike of dissonance. Perhaps this was how the album was meant to be designed, but the resulting presentation doesn't lend itself well to either an atmospheric listening experience or one in which you could just crank up the sound and rattle your neighbors' windows. There could be several reasons why the album's constant switching could cause it to seem misguided and lost, including the possibility that Milan could have simply chosen to include scores for popular horror films rather than popular scores for horror films. Or, more likely, they might have been restricted to only those that they could afford to include on the product. The latter speculation begs for the usual questions that consumers will ask about the obvious selections omitted from a compilation like this. Perhaps the intent of the album was not to choose the all-time choice cuts, and it appears as though modern audiences were the target (1999 was a year for a sudden explosion of Hitchcock/Herrmann compilations on the market, making this one a bit unique). Any film score collector will be able to think of many other more impressive and enjoyable horror scores that could have greatly assisted the album's flow. In some cases, the best cue from the scores that do appear on "Choice Cuts" isn't even chosen. The cut from Scream is in no way one of the strongest from that or Beltrami's one sequel at the time. Conversely, the representation of the underrated Nick Pike on the album is quite welcomed. Still, no horror album like this would be complete without more from Chris Young's great horror career (such as the themes from Hellraiser or The Fly films), and it would have been a more intriguing product to modern ears had there been some John Ottman or John Debney material included. As it is, despite featuring original recordings (a major plus for any compilation), the album is too weighty in the 80's style and begs too many questions from the knowledgeable film score fan. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download