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.