Filmtracks: King Kong Lives (John Scott)

King Kong Lives: (John Scott) Ten years after our favorite Kong was machine-gunned off the top of the World Trade Center in the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis production of King Kong, a sequel was released under the notion that the beast survived the fall and has been hidden by the government during the following decade. The 1986 production of King Kong Lives was another De Laurentiis venture, opening with the final scene of the 1976 film and featuring much of the same crew. Director John Guillermin would return for King Kong Lives, only to see the film end a long career that included The Towering Inferno. The script is really what sunk this sequel, with its laughable premise and ridiculous fallacies in logic rendering the film completely pointless. The actors seemed to realize that they were involved in a boring production, given their completely uninspired performances of cheesy dialogue. The film does have the notable attraction of a brief partial nudity shot of actress Linda Hamilton, as fans everywhere seem to have re-discovered. One part of the original crew who would not return was composer John Barry, despite the director's continued insistence that the score feature tragic romance music rather than straight bombast for some of its action scenes. Guillermin would turn to veteran composer John Scott, whose career has varied greatly between television, documentaries, and feature films from the early 1960's through the 2000's. Even though he is still composing well into the digital era, he'll probably be forever known for scoring countless Jacques Cousteau documentaries in the 1980's. His large-scale action scores, especially in the 1980's, can't be dismissed, however, and King Kong Lives was one such triumph that far eclipsed the film in quality. In fact, Scott's work for King Kong Lives is so magnificent in scope that it adds another laughable aspect to a film that was already trying all too hard to take itself seriously.

Scott's music for King Kong Lives is larger than life in every regard, forcing the Graunke Symphony Orchestra to its limits of bombast. With phenomenally engaging and powerful themes for both Kong and the hunters after him, Scott cranks up the volume with performances of action more interesting than the music written by Barry or James Newton Howard for the other modern Kong films. Interludes of a love theme for Lady Kong, the Kong baby, as well as the dumb human relationship in the film, serve as counterpoint to the immense size of the sound that Scott provides for the rest of the score. Hints of Golden Age sensibilities exist in the highly lyrical romanticism of the themes, with Scott's title theme sharing similarities to John Debney's reworking of the Disney "Phantom Manor/Haunted House" music. The balance between sections in the orchestra is extraordinary, with flourishing woodwinds accompanying intelligent layers of brass and strings in every major cue. The German performers knock themselves out in King Kong Lives, often generating more harmonic noise than even the most active John Williams or David Arnold science-fiction efforts. On album, the score is an outstanding listening experience, complete with the roars of Kong at the outset of a few cues. The score (released regularly on LP) had never established itself on commercial albums, available only in retracted American and Japanese releases that were nearly impossible to obtain. A 1997 bootleg (unrecognized officially by John Scott) provided the King Kong Lives score in magnificent sound quality, along with a few suites from other notable Scott scores. The two minutes from Phantom of the Sun are intoxicating in their merging of classical and exotic elements, and the title theme from The Final Countdown is as lyrically heroic as you can get. These cues are also in crisp sound quality, and given the unavailability of Phantom of the Sun on album, its inclusion here is most welcome. Overall, bootlegs rarely hit the mark, but this "Ape Records" album is nothing short of outstanding. *****