Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you accept even the vampire genre's most generic orchestral and synthetic tones, a blend of tired but effective sounds from scores like Queen of the Damned and Twilight. Avoid it... if you require a score that establishes a cohesive stylistic character or narrative flow and thus provides more than just an immediate, basic mood for each scene. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant: (Stephen Trask) So you want to get rich quick? Forget all those annoying scams you see on television and online. Instead, write a series of novels about teenagers coming into contact with vampire cultures. Twist the vampire mythos however you desire; let not historical precedence inform your narrative. Saturate your story with coming of age and self-discovery subplots, interpersonal conflicts of a high school setting, and throw in some marginally original fantasy elements to cover your ass from a plagiarism lawsuit. Market your simplistic novels to the teenage crowd and await a healthy check from a studio or producer interested in translating several of your novels into what hopefully will yield a franchise of films, even if it means cramming and twisting parts of several of your books into a cliffhanger of a first film. Have that film released around Halloween and hope for its marketing campaign to go viral. After all, young people, for some strange reason, love vampires these days, and when is there a better time than Halloween to suck the cash from their cheap plastic wallets and purses? The good news is that despite the 2009 Universal film Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant following this formula precisely, there are no signs that studios plan to abandon their plight for vampire profits anytime soon. Based on Darren Shan's "Vampire Blood" trilogy, The Vampire's Assistant covers plot fragments from several novels, leaving all the basic, stereotypical pieces of the story hanging for a sequel that hopefully will never come. It suffices to say that some young, handsome dip gets involved by accident with a vampire culture at war for centuries and he has to become one of them to save a friend, fulfill a debt, reject his new powers, meet strange people, and eventually look super-cool. Unfortunately, along with the evolution of the vampire sub-genre of horror films from Hollywood towards the quality of mindless, lower budget trash, so too has the music in these films lost its way. Over the thirty years prior to The Vampire's Assistant, the scores for vampire films have gone from the realm of John Williams, Wojciech Kilar, George Fenton, and Elliot Goldenthal to that of Richard Gibbs, Jonathan Davis, Carter Burwell, and Stephen Trask. As a result, the music for these films continues to scratch tediously at the walls. Trask's score for The Vampire's Assistant once again reinforces that the genre's sound has lost its truly stirring gothic personality despite the sometimes impressive attempts to resurrect it from the dead. This particular entry makes more of an effort to stir the pot than what Gibbs and Davis managed for Queen of the Damned or Burwell's completely limp Twilight. The closest relative to The Vampire's Assistant in musical terms is indeed Queen of the Damned, for you can hear another time the results of a rock band member attempting to contribute a massively-conceived orchestral score and failing to bring all the pieces together into a compelling package. Trask's career officially entered the film score scene with a bang upon 2001's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but he has since failed to really make a name for himself with the small-scale, intimate film scores he's been involved with in his sixteen scores leading up to The Vampire's Assistant. It's clear that this vampire production wanted a score that blended traditional gothic sensibilities from orchestral and choral tones with a slight touch of electronic manipulation and other methods of modernizing the genre for the target audience. Trask raises a significant amount of ruckus from the Hollywood Studio Symphony for The Vampire's Assistant, mixing in some of the ambient vocal and keyboarded soundscapes heard in Queen of the Damned. The style of the orchestra's arrangement and occasional compositional structures resembles that of Danny Elfman on the surface, though this similarity is more than likely due to the involvement of Steve Bartek and other regulars in Elfman's crew on this project. The unique accents, most commonly taking the form of dissonant and sometimes shrill vocal effects (usually heard in the first half) or straight sound effects of a wind-blowing variety, seem like leftovers from both Queen of the Damned and Dario Marianelli's The Brothers Grimm, though their application here is not as distinctive as in those two previous works. Light ensemble choral effects offer some of the score's harmonious moments of wonder, though these passages in the second half are often short and lacking in convincing depth. The whistling and mandolin character heard in "The Whistle Song" at the start is not explored or reinforced in the remainder of the score. For some, this will be a plus. Alone, the texture that Trask creates for The Vampire's Assistant is sufficient in meeting the basic needs of the film, but having the right feel for a genre cannot typically alone make for a successful score. Bruno Coulais' music for Coraline earlier in the year managed to accomplish this feat, but nothing from Trask matches the same devilish creativity. There exists no inherent narrative to the music for The Vampire's Assistant, nor is there a truly consistent set of motifs or sounds that can immediately identify the work at any moment. Harmony comes at a premium and themes are extremely elusive. The opening title track introduces a rhythmic figure, a rambling ostinato that does recur throughout portions of the score and is the piece of the puzzle that most listeners will recognize from the stylebook of Elfman. For all the spirit and tenacity that rips and snorts by the end of that "The Vampire's Assistant" cue, there is still no thematic representation of any clarity to emerge from the slapping mess of noise. The longer you wait for Trask to give this score an enduring identity, the more dissatisfying it becomes. You ultimately have to be patient until the last cue, "Vampire Bird," when a cohesive melodic element finally comes into play. By then, you get the impression that this crescendo of theme is meant to suggest events to come in another film, and while it's nice to hear some semblance of continuity perhaps in development, the last three minutes of the score are far too late for this to occur. The entirety of The Vampire's Assistant sounds like a stream of consciousness effort, handling each scene with rather generic orchestral procedures and thumping electronic enhancements. The occasional modern sensibility, as in the guitar and male vocal combination in "You Can't Just Leave," isn't vibrant or substantial enough to give the score crossover appeal. Slight industrial tones, like the metallic percussive sounds in "Rooftop," even when aided by droning bass power, also fail to do the same. Perhaps if Trask had better integrated the catchy mandolin and whistling tune heard at the outset, the score might have transformed into a somewhat memorable piece. An extremely long album featuring only the score becomes tiring by its concluding four tracks, which feature some compositional contributions by others in Trask's team. An intimate mix, extending to even the other-worldly female vocal effects, doesn't help in producing a fantasy environment. In the end, this drifting score does its job, but barely. ** Track Listings:
Total Time: 70:33
* composed by Stephen Trask and Amanda Goodpaster ** composed by Stephen Trask and Lior Rosner All artwork and sound clips from The Vampire's Assistant are Copyright © 2009, Varèse Sarabande. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 10/24/09, updated 10/24/09. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2009-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
