Buy it... only if you've already sought and enjoyed the more readily available (and possibly easier to appreciate) Gremlins II score on album.

Avoid it... if you tend to be annoyed by Jerry Goldsmith's harsher electronic tones that existed primarily in his mid-80's scores.

Goldsmith

Gremlins: (Jerry Goldsmith) Joe Dante's comedic answer to every horror movie cliche in the playbook was the 1984 romp Gremlins, a laugh fest involving the now infamous little fuzzballs that grow into nasty killers and terrorize a perfect little American town. The rules are relatively simple, and audiences became well aware that when you happen across a cute little creature called a Mogwai, it's generally a good idea to avoid feeding it after midnight and/or getting it wet. If you commit the first error, the adorable fluffball grows into a big vicious gremlin that will act similarly to the monsters in the Alien series. If you commit the second error, you compound the problem by causing them to multiply like tribbles. Either way, as everyone knows by now, expose them to sunshine and your problem is more or less solved. The setting in Gremlins was an unsuspecting town you might see in any horror film, and along with exploiting the Christmas season and common myths about your local Chinatown, Dante would shock audiences with enough funny scares to merit a 1990 sequel in which the same lead characters fight off the little beasts in an urban skyscraper. The director's relationship with composer Jerry Goldsmith had begun with Dante's Twilight Zone and was just beginning to role with Gremlins, a project obviously tackled with much humor by the veteran composer. His experimentation with electronics was in full swing by 1984, with many of his most successful largely-synthetic scores coming in the following few years. In many ways, Goldsmith's technique in Gremlins would be a warm-up for Dante's satirical The 'Burbs, for which Goldsmith would write a remarkably funny score with a perfect combination of snappy Americana spirit and synthetic mayhem. Some listeners might even say that Goldsmith's merging of the orchestral and synthetic styles would make Gremlins II a more mature and listenable score. But maturity wasn't the primary idea for Gremlins, a score that was supposed to sound ridiculous for much of its length.

It is with an active sense of humor that you have to appreciate Gremlins, despite the fact that most of what you hear in its contents would be executed better by Goldsmith in subsequent efforts. In this case, it's the idea that counts, and Goldsmith hits the nail on the head with his concepts. The catchy title theme for Gremlins was a staple of the composer's concert rounds for many years, and whether you can tolerate it or not, there's no getting around the fact that it's memorable. Its lone full performance in Gremlins comes in the end credits, and is performed entirely by the composer's electronics. Its appearance throughout the film coincides with the rise of the evil side of the gremlins, with the pace of the film never allowing it much cohesiveness for lengthy periods of time. More enjoyable are the two subthemes that become more evident on album. First, Gizmo's theme, heard in "The Gift" and extensively the final two cues, is the expected tender and loving representation of the lead gremlin's cute personality. Second, a rollicking theme for the town itself is introduced in "Late for Work" and features Goldsmith in perhaps the most humorous township spirit since The Film-Flam Man (without the Western stylings, of course). Both of these themes would be exploited by the sequel's score, arguably to an equal or greater effect. A less tolerable theme for "Mrs. Deagle" takes some of the more obnoxious, slurred low-range electronics (sounding like a badly mutate tuba) from the upcoming Legend and arranges them into an insufferably bizarre march. One of the better qualities of both Gremlins scores is Goldsmith's knack for extra touches of creativity that define the scores' character. In the original, these range from a straight forward presentation of the Christmas carol "Silent Night" to a single sound effect that dominates the score. That sound is a merging of a yowling cat and a police siren, usually offered in tones closer to the former than the latter. Goldsmith uses the cat howl as an ominous, animalistic warning that things are awry, and the technique (among a few others) works.

On album, though, some of the sound effects are a tad difficult to enjoy at times, especially when mixed harshly at the forefront of the soundscape. The presentation of electronics and orchestra together aren't integrated as well as they could be in Gremlins, with the two often existing best when separated. A straight, triumphant action rhythm in "Gizmo Saves the Day" is a Prokofiev/Horner-style, militaristic tone for orchestra alone (possibly a nod to Horner's popular Star Trek scores at the time). Overall, Gremlins is a score you have to love, but one that doesn't necessarily offer its own material at its best; both the sequel score and a number of performing groups (the City of Prague Philharmonic in particular... one of their best performances ever) have proven that an orchestra alone can have a riot with the "Gremlin Rag" better than even Goldsmith's original synths could accomplish. With that in mind, Gremlins II may be a better listening experience on album for some. The situation involving the original Gremlins on album is problematic. The commercial Geffen CD, a very early product, would feature only 16 minutes of Goldsmith's score along with the usual assortment of songs (Geffen would do the same to Goldsmith's Innerspace a few years later), and fans inevitably sought out a variety of bootlegs of 50 minutes from Gremlins that became available at the end of the 1990's. These bootlegs typically featured poor sound and tacked a few tracks from The Twilight Zone onto the end, though subsequent variants of the bootleg would offer Gremlins alone on a bootleg with the same tracks, but vastly improved sound quality that is largely indistinguishable from other Goldsmith scores of the era. If you're just getting your feet wet in the world of gremlin music, then maybe the commercially available sequel score would be a better start. But few would deny that Gremlins itself is an endearing classic from the height of Goldsmith's electronically-dominated phase in the 1980's. ****

Bias Check:

For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.25 (in 82 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.46 (in 116,682 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.