Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #1,020
Written 3/15/97, Revised 3/24/13
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Buy it... if you're a sucker for high-quality, orchestral fantasy
and adventure scores, always in search of the genre's hidden gems.
Avoid it... if the genre of 1980's spin-off fantasy music sounds
tired, derivative, and badly dated to you, especially when it attempts
to borrow frequently from James Horner's vintage techniques.
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| Folk |
Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time: (Robert
Folk) You really have to wonder what original "Beastmaster" novelist
Andre Norton thought of the wretched path this concept took through
theatres and cable television over a two-decade span. With the original
Beastmaster film (which was among the many fantasy adventure
follow-ups of the early 1980's to the surprising popularity of Conan
the Barbarian) enjoying a significantly lucrative second life on
cable television, it was decided to haul a now aging Marc Singer into
his title role on the big screen once again in the early 1990's, hoping
(successfully, as fate would have it), that the film would rake in
similar cash on cable. Halfway along that road to rebirth, one that
yielded another sequel with Singer after this, as well as a spin-off
television series, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time
stayed in the theatres just long enough to receive an appropriately
brutal slashing from critics, who didn't need much intelligence to
notice all the ways in which corners were cut to meet a smaller
production budget. In many ways, Beastmaster 2 mirrored the
earlier "He-Man" film Masters of the Universe in its laughable
failures; with no black paint to once again portray one of the title
character's animal companions as a panther, it's simply a tiger this
time around. And, like Masters of the Universe, much of the movie
is shot in modern America, with a "portal of time" introduced by a witch
played by Sarah Douglas (the evil superwoman of Superman II,
reflecting the best of "He-Man"'s Meg Foster, including even more
cleavage), giving ancient times the lovely threat of nuclear
annihilation. Seeing Singer run around Los Angeles in a loincloth is
about as good as it gets here, except, of course, for the obligatory,
hilarious scene of upscale department store destruction and the usual
overachieving score by composer Robert Folk. Interestingly, Folk would
produce for Beastmaster 2 exactly what Bill Conti had provided
for Masters of the Universe: a score that exceeds the film in
quality to such a degree that it sounds badly out of place in context.
Then again, Folk, whose career had been defined by Police Academy
and Ace Ventura music, has seemingly always tackled projects like
this one (and countless others) with such energetic enthusiasm that his
work is always worth appreciation apart from the film. He had just
completed Toy Soldiers the same year, and the two scores stand
among his very best despite their awkward positions in their
pictures.
Folk's work on
Beastmaster 2 is, despite
overplaying its hand, an understandable endeavor. Even the trashiest
old-world adventure films of the 1980's tried to compensate for their
lameness by saving much of their budgets for overwhelming orchestral
scores. Despite composer Lee Holdridge's equal abilities in
overproducing in the genre, his music for the original
Beastmaster film would not be as well refined as his music a
decade later, and Folk, with the encouragement of the director, opted to
abandon Holdridge's themes for the sequel. This choice turned out to be
no great loss, for Folk has always been talented at the art of catchy
melodies, and for
Beastmaster 2 he provides a variety of standard
but well executed themes for the genre. The heroic idea for the titular
Dar is ambitiously muscular without becoming outright hokey, referenced
as necessary in full fanfare mode. The secondary themes of romance are
where this score really shines, "Creature's Story," "Jackie Alone on
Desert," "Travel Montage," and "Key to the Heart" presenting the softer
material in melodramatic harmonic bliss. Still, more memorable than his
themes in this relentlessly powerful score are Folk's consistently
satisfying rhythmic progressions, tonal sensibilities, and wildly
orchestrated romp of a performance. Like Conti in
Masters of the
Universe, Folk never gives in to the temptation to insert modern-day
musical tones for the scenes in Los Angeles; outside of some subtle
synthetic accompaniment a la Basil Poledouris of the era, the music for
Beastmaster 2 is a massive symphonic movement born from the ranks
of Poledouris'
Conan the Barbarian and James Horner's
Krull. Don't be surprised if you hear a fair amount of vintage
Horner material bleed through in Folk's mannerisms, begging temp track
questions. Always frenetic in its pace, Folk layers his music
wonderfully with several lines of action at once, never wasting the
opportunity to run each section of the ensemble over each other in
harmonious but independent lines. As such,
Beastmaster 2 may not
have any singular cues that really stand apart from the rest, but the
whole consistently impresses from start to finish with a spirited
performance by the 96-member Berlin orchestra (which is overwhelmed by
the composition at times, but does its valiant best). An original
Intrada album from 1992 fell badly out of print before long, and BSX
Records re-pressed the same contents onto a limited CD in 2013. On
either product, you will not be disappointed by Folk's overflowing
enthusiasm for the kind of orchestral majesty that waned in popularity
in the industry just a few years later.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
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