Buy it... if you desire one of Marco Beltrami's most rounded and entertaining career achievements, extending his orchestral and choral talents to both majestic and carnival-like ends in an alternately quirky and awesome superhero score.

Avoid it... if you have no tolerance for wild theremins or substandard album releases, the latter issue relating to missing cues of importance and obnoxious clicking sounds on the pressed product.

Beltrami

Hellboy: (Marco Beltrami) Yet another comic book hero, this time from the Dark Horse realm, punched his way onto the big screen in 2004, and while Hellboy may not have been as widely known as other comic favorites, his cinematic debut fared well enough for Sony to launch a franchise based on the concept. Director Guillermo Del Toro brought to life this tale of a "Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense" where freaks with special powers are raised to fight for good causes, begging questions about the redundancy of these folks, the X-Men, Mutant X, and all the other weird fighters out there. One such freakish character is Hellboy, a mammoth with horns who was bred by Nazis during World War II (of course, why is it always Nazis? Why not the Communists? Or radical Muslims? Or, better yet, the American military?) to unleash evil upon the planet. But under the care of the father-like leader of this mysterious Bureau, Hellboy resists attempts to lure him back to the dark side and fights on the behalf of an oblivious society. Along for the ride are his companion freaks, one of which the obligatory love interest, and betrayal is inevitable in this tale of unusual powers. It's typical comic book fluff for sure, and Del Toro reunited with his Blade II composer, Marco Beltrami, to provide the score for Hellboy. Beltrami had, for the prior decade, seemed content dwelling in the foggy musical depths of pop culture horror flicks, with the Scream trilogy serving as starting point for other Beltrami works such as Mimic, Resident Evil, Joy Ride, and a dozen other nearly nameless scores. In 2003 came Beltrami's first major break into the blockbuster scoring scene, receiving the assignment for Terminator 3 after much turmoil in the selection process for a composer to continue that franchise. Even for supporters of Beltrami's career, Terminator 3 was a muddled failure to grasp a great opportunity, with only a mediocre effort provided for the hit project. Fortunately, the project catapulted the composer on to several subsequent franchise-like assignments, and those disappointed by Terminator 3 were treated to a significant improvement in Hellboy.

The appeal of this score is not completely due to creativity in the comic hero genre, but also the substance of depth heard in the orchestra, choir, several specialty instruments, and the thematic bravado with which it all comes together. Such is the case with Hellboy, which strictly orchestral film score enthusiasts will likely enjoy more than nearly all other previous Beltrami works. That is, if you can find solace in an album presentation that remains one of the most notoriously awful in the history of the Varèse Sarabande label (more on that later). There's nothing better than the flexibility of comic book-inspired score writing to bring the best and brightest of fully orchestral mayhem out of a composer, and Beltrami does not disappoint in Hellboy. If the size of the score, especially compared to Beltrami's usually more subdued ensembles, doesn't impress you, then the creativity of the composition will. His work is complete with the usual, straight-forward orchestral hero theme and a variety of interesting secondary ideas, and yet, the more intriguing aspect of Hellboy is the sense of style that Beltrami injects into the equation. Not only does the titular character exist and kick butt, but he also does so with a confident style of swing and elegance, a distinct swagger of sorts, and Beltrami supplements this style in his score by utilizing tango rhythms, operatic vocals, and swooshing strings for the universe that surrounds him. He also indulges listeners with the "coolness" factor inherent in the primary characters by throwing in the obligatory but entertaining electric guitar rhythm in the "Main Title" cue that, at the start, would make you swear that Clint Eastwood was lurking behind some dark corner. Such Spaghetti Western personality would be expanded upon by Beltrami very satisfyingly in 3:10 to Yuma, incidentally. The main character's secondary theme of melodrama, heard first at the height of "Meet Hellboy" and sparingly on the album thereafter, is a highlight even though it resembles Jerry Goldsmith's main theme from The Edge. A sensitive theme on strings for Hellboy and his pyrokenetic love interest, marginally reminiscent of Danny Elfman's Spider-Man material, is well developed in several places, too, reaching its emotional pinnacle in the beautiful, tonally magnificent "Hellboy & Liz." A remarkable waltz-like theme for the father of the group is developed in the operatic "Kroenen's Lied" and translated to monumental lamentation mode in "Father's Funeral."

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In terms of Hellboy 's general style, Beltrami sometimes dances into the bizarre end of the instrumental spectrum with a wailing theremin in several cues, carrying the load at the start of "Stand By Your Man" and going so far as to merge at very low ranges with a jazzy female vocal in the offbeat "B.P.R.D." That last cue on the album presentation, ironically, is where Beltrami most obviously takes a page from early Elfman music in sheer craziness of rhythm and instrumentation, leaving the listener with the false impression of derangement that doesn't really foreshadow any substantive connection to the composer who would take over the franchise's compositional duties for the sequel. In parts, Beltrami does skirt the boundaries of a carnival atmosphere, but the memorable sequences are the largely orchestral and choral cues that make up the substantial base of the music. Conversely, some of the whipping staccato arrangements of brass during fight sequences are where the score loses some ground, moving at speeds difficult to tolerate for their sheer volume. The weaker portions are those that also emulate the faceless, "wall of sound" action material to come shortly thereafter for Beltrami in the inferior I, Robot. Franchise enthusiasts may prefer Elfman's more overtly melodramatic highlights in 2008's Hellboy II: The Golden Army (indeed a magnificent follow-up in parts), though be aware that the 45-minute album release for the original Hellboy is severely lacking. It omits important passages in the score, reportedly because it only includes music Beltrami recorded with the Skywalker Symphony Orchestra and not additional music recorded in different sessions with the Hollywood Studio Symphony in Los Angeles. Also, occasional performance errors are distractingly apparent, led by a brass flub at 1:16 into "Stand By Your Man." That track is also the source of much discontentment over clicking sounds and other artifacts that somehow escaped the mastering process and cause frequent problems with album enjoyment. Some copies of the album (including Filmtracks' promotional CD tested prior to this review's writing) are seemingly absent this digital pop artifact, though countless buyers of the product have complained through the years about obvious rhythmic clicks occurring every 3 to 6 seconds in a few tracks on their CDs. The label has taken substantial heat for this album for all of the above reasons, but regardless of these issues, the score still stands as a tremendous opportunity for film score enthusiasts to hear Beltrami apply his orchestral talents to both majestic and quirky ends in an impressive comic hero's score. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75 (in 20 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.87 (in 14,767 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.