Buy it... only if you are a John Debney completist, for his mainstream debut in the horror genre is as pedestrian and underachieving as the film itself.

Avoid it... if you expect Debney to offer something beyond the usual, stock horror slashes and ensemble hits that define the genre's most tiresome cliches.

Debney

The Relic: (John Debney) When the MPAA classifies films with a rating, there's a category of "extreme gore" that earns the accompanying the film an automatic "R" rating. Films like The Relic are easy qualifiers in the "extreme gore" department, though with so many films in the 1980's and 1990's trying to take advantage of the same general premise of "scary monster chasing trapped humans," you have to wonder why every variant of that equation is so popular. The 1995 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child took the same old monster formula and applied it to a museum environment, and with predictable turns left and right, Chicago's Museum of Natural History becomes the arena in which trapped humans are the prey for some nasty Brazilian monster that was shipped to the place and now desires the taste of human brain matter. The film proved several things. First, it showed that director Peter Hyams had lost the knack for the kind of truly stimulating suspense sequences that filled Outland and Capricorn One. Second, it definitely proved that Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore were not the heroes you'd want battling a monster if you were stuck in a building with it. And finally, despite a lengthy and illustrious career, The Relic told film score collectors that rising composer John Debney hadn't quite mastered the horror genre by 1997. The composer had made a living scoring Disney productions and was in transition to mainstream releases like Liar Liar and Sudden Death, both of which average works, while stunning listeners with a score for Cutthroat Island that far exceeded the quality of the film. Although anticipation for Debney and his official horror debut in The Relic was high, the composer fell back on predictable cliches and instrumental usage that begged for far more creativity than it would receive. For films of The Relic's dubious quality, Debney often underachieved, and this entry is no different. With that in mind, The Relic alternates between boring and obnoxious, depending on how much aimless noise is being generated at any given moment. A standard orchestra with no solo standouts or unique instrumentation performs on a bleak canvas with almost no imagination to be heard.

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There are a handful of motifs that Debney utilizes throughout The Relic, but none of them is given enough development or full repetition to be considered as the overarching identity of the work. The final track on the album, "Theme from The Relic," motions through these ideas with monotonous pacing. The actual title theme is a very slight, four-note theme quoted by the lowest registers of the ensemble that also seems to follow the beast, and its most interesting incarnation exists on bass woodwind at 2:10 into "Theme from The Relic." A motif for the sake of mystery is used in nearly every major cue in the film. This two-note descending alternation is only barely effective as a tool for continuity. Additionally, Debney relies on a tingling and plucking string effect to represent the awful monster itself, and while the use of this technique is put to adequate use here, it's somewhat of a cliche in and of itself. A free-floating idea based on a mundane three-note sequence is integrated throughout the score, but its only major performances by the full ensemble are heard on strings late in "The Relic" and "Theme from The Relic." None of these elements really leaves an impression as strong as the simplistic bashing of the ensemble for the actual attack sequences. Debney relies heavily on standard orchestral slashes and hits, the kind of pedestrian, B-rate technique that synthesizers have imitated for years. He also liberally quotes the bold and frenetic strokes of strings that Bernard Herrmann utilized in Psycho, but without the intelligent introduction or conveyance of those ideas. Everything in The Relic is provided at the wholesale level, whether you're forced to tolerate generic horror surprises or two or three cues of lengthy, minimalistic voids. The score understandably never received a commercial release, though it was the sixth of John Debney's original series of official promotional albums. Within just two years of the 42-minute promo's distribution through soundtrack specialty outlets, it became a hot collectible, and, like the promo of I Know What You Did Last Summer, fetched over $100 per copy. To think that fans actually paid such sums for this mediocre horror venture is far more genuinely terrifying that anything the music itself has to offer. **

Bias Check:

For John Debney reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.22 (in 42 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.06 (in 37,130 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.