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Vibes: (James Horner) There are only two groups of people in the world who would have any reason to even
want to remember the 1988 movie
Vibes: Cyndi Lauper fans and James Horner fans. The film was, for some reason, backed by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment production company, with a horrendous script from two of the co-writers of Howard's
Splash who were attempting, probably, to take advantage of the resurfacing popular interest in parapsychology and the supernatural (spearheaded by the wildly successful
Ghostbusters). The premise of the film involves two psychicly gifted characters, one a hair-stylist played by Lauper and the other a museum expert played by Jeff Goldlbum. They are conned into seeking adventure in Ecuador, thinking that they'd be helping someone find a lost child when indeed their psychic powers would be needed on a perilous mission to find a mystic pyramid and unlock its powers. Along the same idea as
Romancing the Stone, the two city folk in a jungle environment manage to hook up by the end of the film, a predictable but truly frightful event. For Lauper, the film would be her big screen debut, and for director Ken Kwapis,
Vibes followed his own debut with the Sesame Street film
Follow That Bird in 1985. Needless to say, the recipe was perfect for disaster. The summer 1988 release floundered and has long since been forgotten, with Lauper's career stalling and Kwapis sent back to the dark corners of television directing. The only notable aspect of the film that remains is the score by then upstart composer James Horner. Already nominated for Academy Awards for his work on
An American Tail and
Aliens, the composer had completed work on the most lengthy and ambitious score of his career,
Willow (an enduring orchestral classic), the same year. The era of electronically ambient Horner music was waning.
For Horner collectors, 1988 marked the trailing years of
the composer's heavy reliance on synthesizers as the sole instrumental
spectrum on his lesser scores; many of his lower-budget efforts in the years
to come would feature at least some moderately-sized orchestra. Even though
it is based seemingly entirely in the electronic realm,
Vibes does
have more character than Horner's more drab synthetic efforts of the era,
such as
The Name of the Rose. While it was reported at the time that
Horner employed a traditional string and brass section for some of the more
supernaturally scary cues, it's difficult to hear their presence in the
final work. What does stand out from the synthetics are the use of a few
select woodwinds, including a pan flute and Japanese sakauhachi flute
(largely introduced in Horner's music that year). A significant array of
percussive sounds, some strikingly electronic and some rattling with a
little more authenticity, brings a vivid soundscape to the score during its
jungle sequences. These elements are all placed over a rhythmic and early
loop-based structure, often utilizing lengthy, repetitious, non-thematic
performances to carry a score heavy on ambience and short on character theme
or romance. That said, Horner's
Vibes does shine at its best when his
thematic material for the score is carried by the flutes. Over the banjos,
guitars, clapping sounds, whimsical high range woodwinds, wood blocks, bird
calls, mid-range drums, and a vast collection of rapping and tapping
instruments, these flutes perform hopelessly chipper themes. Unfortunately,
their exotic fun is restricted to the first half of the film, during which
the characters first arrive in the Andes ("Andes Arrival" and "The Journey
Begins"), and the score becomes much darker, atonal, and harshly electronic
in the other half. This sinister half culminates in "Silvia's Vision," with
heavy, off-key electronic droning accompanied by simple minor key
alternations by synthetic brass and string, along with the disturbing sounds
of dismembered voices.
Despite the score's high points, Horner seems to allow it
to die miserably at the end, with no resolution of ideas in the "End Title"
and a choice made not to score the film's romantic moments at all. He seems
to have gotten hung up on the artistically rich atmosphere of the location,
for in the final cue --as he does throughout the entire piece-- Horner
wanders from motif to motif, rhythm to rhythm, leaving the only connecting
thread in the form of the score's inherent unique instrumentation. Overall,
Vibes remains decades later as one of James Horner's more bizarre
works, exhibiting very few of the usual commonalities that typically connect
his other scores. Along those same lines,
Vibes is also a score that
fans of the composer can use very effectively in combating arguments about
the composer's relative lack of originality.
Nothing in the world of modern film scores sounds remotely like
Vibes
(though Thomas Newman might be the type to try), and Horner collectors
specifically will be startled by the stark differences between this and the
concurrently scored
Willow. On album, the awkward and disjointed
score exists in short length, but stands as one of the most collectible CDs
in the history of films scores. Standing as the fourth entry in the
Varèse Sarabande label's first set of Club releases around 1990, the
pressing of
Vibes was limited to an astonishingly low 1,000 copies.
That low pressing number was even surprising at the time, given that Horner
had just stunned audiences with
Glory and was sailing to the
forefront of the industry. The album sold out, as expected, and has sold for
as much as $400 on the secondary market even after the profileration of the
score in bootleg form (which features only the identical musical content
and, usually, the same copied packaging as well). The Lauper song from the
film, "Hole in My Heart," understandably does not appear on the album.
Despite the score's two thematically enticing cues, the entire score
requires a mood of significant funk to enjoy from start to finish, and for
most collectors it will reveal itself as a curiosity rather than a
necessity.
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| Bias Check: | For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
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