Buy it... on the rare 2011 expanded album if you seek excellent treatment (including improved sound quality) of one of Marco Beltrami's most accessible horror efforts.

Avoid it... if even ten minutes of the composer's more alluring lyricism in this genre cannot sustain your interest beyond the somewhat standard but well executed stingers, dissonant challenges, and varied percussive usage in this dynamically organic recording.

Beltrami

Mimic: (Marco Beltrami) Perhaps the most fascinating statement ever made by director Guillermo del Toro was one in which he confessed that his experience making the 1997 movie Mimic was more frustrating than even the kidnapping of his own father in Mexico, which happened at roughly the same time. The production woes involving the film were mostly caused by the distrust of the young director by producer Bob Weinstein, who constantly imposed his personal will upon nearly every aspect of the movie. The fundamental purpose of the plot was at stake in the disagreement, Del Toro seeking to make a comment about the human ego through artistic merit and Weinstein looking to reap the benefits of the standard B-rate slasher techniques that had just been resurrected by his own company. The plot is one that takes several elements from the Alien franchise and places them in the subway system underneath New York City. When a pair of cocky scientists genetically engineer an insect meant to wipe out the city's cockroaches, which are spreading a disease that is killing human children, they succeed by inadvertently equipping their new species with the capability to evolve at incredibly fast rates. After only three years, this species has grown to human size and, for the convenient purposes of a horror film, both feast on humans for their food and can emulate their looks well enough to cause another layer of panic. Despite Del Toro's attempts to make the film "beautiful" in its conveyance of the insects, the final product took the shape of the cheap horror flick that Weinstein had in mind, and Mimic was ultimately dismissed by critics and audiences alike, failing to recoup its $30 million budget in domestic grosses. Despite its many faults, the movie was an important stepping stone for composer Marco Beltrami, however, the second in a long collaboration with the Weinsteins that would launch and sustain his early career. Moreover, Mimic was evidence that their prior work together, Scream, was not a fluke. While Beltrami's contribution to Scream did not flow completely smoothly in production, either, it did introduce a striking melody and beefy orchestral horror sound to its franchise, and Mimic is largely a continuation of that same general technique. The composer did have to report to both Del Toro and Weinstein during his creation process, an awkward situation by Beltrmai's recollection, but his work managed to satisfy both parties. In particular, the director pushed Beltrami to expose his thematic portions of Mimic with straight forward lyricism to emphasize his interpretation of the beauty of the topic. Not surprisingly, the result is a score that is quite accessible within its genre.

There will be listeners for whom the horror genre, with all of its stingers and unpleasant orchestral applications, will never be appealing on album, but for a novice collector entering the genre for the first time, Mimic is a relatively safe place to start. In these regards, it's much like a Christopher Young horror score, utilizing orchestra and choir in gothic mode, applying at least one redemptive, lovely theme, and letting rip with rhythmic sequences of action for varied percussion that will shake the walls. One of the reasons Beltrami looks back fondly upon Mimic is its organic origins; even though the industry was pretty much computerized by the late 1990's, this score was a "pencil on paper" product that was recorded with the entire orchestra playing together and with minimal electronic manipulation. There are synthetic accents employed in the score, but in the mass of the score, what you hear is unadulterated orchestral performances in natural unison. As such, Beltrami was able to orchestrate much of the music himself, exploring a variety of clicking sounds meant to emulate the language and other noises of the insect species. Starting in "Release the Judas," he teases out several percussive techniques that will eventually dominate the later action sequences. A crispness to the orchestral performances is further evidence of the organic nature of the recording, with much of the score resembling Species and other equivalent Young works, especially by the last forty seconds of "Fleeing Terror," which is almost a pure homage to the horror master's style. There is really only one primary theme in Mimic, but Beltrami manipulates it so well that it applies to nearly any circumstance in the picture. Its grandiose performance at the height of "Main Titles" dissolves to melodramatic dread in "Children's Hospital." It survives to become the subject of a pretty flute performance in "I'll Go" and a duo of sublime, easily tonal presentations in "Reunited" and "End Credits," the former featuring brass counterpoint of Jerry Goldsmith resemblance and the latter resounding with immense choral accompaniment. The score does access cliches at times, including the boy soprano right at the start (seemingly an ominous twist on Graeme Revell's concurrent usage in The Saint) and slashing string, exploding brass hits for stingers in the central portion of the score. Still, there are enough accessible highlights in Mimic to recommend the score to non-horror film music collectors. The original Varèse Sarabande commercial album contained the score's highlights and an average rock song, but the label's 2011 limited and expanded run of 1,000 copies (which quickly sold out) of the score alone contains several important thematic additions and noticeably improved sound quality. This rare album is a necessity in any Beltrami collection, best representing one of the composer's top horror efforts. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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