During the recent Barnes & Noble Summer 50% Off Criterion sale I finally picked up David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981). Having now recently re-watched the film (it's... fine), I figured I'd expand just a bit on my thoughts on Shore's music having now heard "the complete score", as it were.

While the collection of cues on the Scanners/The Brood Mondo LP (and what was included on the older "Dead Ringers: Music from the Films of David Cronenberg" compilation) is the majority of the score, it's not all of the music as I had erroneously stated/remembered. That said... there's not much of note that wasn't included outside of a few more statements of the primary Dies Irae theme and some more string based suspense material. The obnoxiously cheap sounding synth work is as annoying within the film as it is on album, though some of this material makes sense (kinda) in context as representing the "Scanner power"... but it's still terribly obnoxious. Speaking of the music within the film, this is one of those odd occurrences where Shore's music doesn't really add much to the proceedings outside of those Dies Irae statements, which I'm guessing were part of the temp track. Within the Cronenberg/Shore collaborations, this is an odd misstep especially sandwiched between The Brood and Videodrome where the music is a far better fit.

I'm still not sure why there's the carnival music randomly stuck in here, though.

So yes, most of my initial review for Scanners remains unchanged (including the low rating), but since I can give a fuller opinion now... I figured I would. I'm not sure if I'll do any more of these little addendum posts for my "mainline" reviews in this series or not, so enjoy this little detour while I finish up the next batch of reviews... hopefully to be posted in the next few days.

Yeah "Scanners" is a strange one for me. I first watched it about fifteen years ago, while going through Cronenberg's older films. I remember a friend of mine who was really big into horror films really liking it, and during my video store days I remembered the 90s era sequels, but never saw the original. I think I was expecting something quite a bit different, but I found the whole thing kinda lackluster - especially compared to his films before and after it. Maybe the shock of exploding heads wasn't enough to these jaded eyes. I do remember the music being a bit distracting, but nothing much beyond that.

Funnily enough we were revisiting the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, "Gunslinger" over the weekend. One of the host segments has the mad scientist, Dr. Forrester reading a book about Scanning for fun and profit. He keeps testing it on his assistant Frank, complete with goofy expressions and sound effects. My favorite part is when he says to Joel and the bots about the upcoming movie, "The movie is directed by Roger Corman, so your heads may explode before Frank's does."

My wife turned to me asking what the hell was going on with the Mads and the staring and the sound effects, and I tried to explain "Scanners" to her from memory and not sound crazy. Just ended up showing her the scene where Michael Ironside blows up his co-host's head.

Anyway long pointless story - hope you enjoyed.