Buy it... if you like punishing yourself and your wallet by collecting spare jewel cases the expensive way.

Avoid it... if you agree that mundane, aimless horror scores with no originality or intelligence are far too frequently employed in substandard movies these days.

Beltrami

Joy Ride: (Marco Beltrami) Just in time for Halloween in 2001, a horror flick about a teenage summer vacation excursion gone awry was released. Does that strike anybody else as poorly timed? Either the production of the film was delayed (courtesy Osama bin Laden?) or someone working one late night in the studio suddenly realized that Joy Ride was going to be such a terrible film that nobody would notice or care about the apparent error. Likely, it was the latter. The cliche-ridden tale involves a college freshman, his dorky brother, and his dorky girlfriend, all of whom decide to cruise dusty rural roads and harass a trucker known only by his CB handle. As fate would have it, of course, the trucker becomes irritated and decides to break a couple of minor traffic safety laws while gaining his crazed revenge. What great joy! Even if you can set aside the fact that Joy Ride is a dumbed-down teenager version of Steven Spielberg's classic film The Duel, then perhaps you still would have been deterred by the fact that movies like this seemed to be produced only for the purpose of spawning terrible music, whether original or in song compilations. It was just another unfortunate substandard entry in the career of a man who seemed at the time to be filling his resume with a long list of terrible stinkers. It's safe to say that in the case of Joy Ride, Marco Beltrami either needed the money or was immune to the infectiously poor quality of the films on which he worked early in his career. Making a living out of scoring poor horror flicks is one thing, but never even trying to do anything original with the genre is another matter, and a baffling one at that. As much as some listeners may dislike the mass of Christopher Young's music for B-grade horror films, he at least attempts (on many occasions) to do something original with his orchestration or themes, giving the work a personality or sense of style. Beltrami, with the exception of a minority of the material in the Scream franchise, tended not to provide anything that could not have been predicted by the listener. His music is just as full of tired cliches and boring constructs as the films he scored. The talent is there, but the incentive or will isn't. In sum, in the event that you don't want to waste your time by reading further, the score for Joy Ride is an unequivocal failure that leaves you scrambling for any alternative with even a hint of intelligence.

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There is no memorable construct with which to anchor Joy Ride, no thematic development, and no minor motif that repeats for a period of time longer than a single cue. There is no consistency, no harmony, and no synthetic creativity. For a score with so much electronic clanging and thumping, one would think that Beltrami would utilize samples of automotive effects to match the story. But no, and as a matter of fact, the dull effects are mixed so that they sound as though they're echoing underwater. Once again, it doesn't make sense for the context. Some of the slight electrical zapping sounds place this work in the science fiction genre. The meandering combination of these mundane atmospheric tones is not intolerable in all of the cues, with the exception of the laughable duo of trashy tracks that concludes the album. The moments of unbearable noise are held to a minimum, but the score attempts to fill space with simply nothing more than a series of wandering orchestral hits (like the one that shatters the conclusion of "Sitchiation") and slowly alternating minor key chords. If you quietly shift between minor third progressions enough times, yes, people will get the idea that something creepy is supposed to be happening on the screen. Choppy strings, brass blasts, and pounding timpani make the orchestral passages of this stylistically low budget score even more cliched than it needed to be. Beltrami goes further and does a few things with the score that make the product practically laughable. His employment of twitching strings in "Charlotte's Web," as mentioned above, is a meager imitation of Bernard Herrmann's classic style of Psycho and Cape Fear. The insufferable "Mole Asses" is not only synthetically obnoxious, but bursts into an awkward steal of the Mongolian music from Jerry Goldsmith's The Shadow. The final track on the album, "Refreshify," complete with nonsensical dialogue and cute synthesizer effects, is a neat method of poking at the listener with a sharp object after subjecting him or her to a full half hour of mind-numbing slop. It's hard not to have extreme disdain for this music when you've heard so many cheap variations on the same idea, and especially when considering that Beltrami had shown signs of greater talent in the past and was wasting his time with assignments such as Joy Ride. There is absolutely no reason to recommend this album to any film score collector; it is arguably the most boring, underdeveloped, and unoriginal score of 2001. Only by the grace of a new musicians' union agreement in Los Angeles regarding re-use fees did trash like this exist on album. *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

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.