Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #626
Written 11/5/99, Revised 3/2/13
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Buy it... only if you seek a complete John Debney collection, for
his mainstream debut in the horror genre is as pedestrian and
underachieving as the film itself.
Avoid it... if you expect Debney to offer something beyond the
usual, stock horror slashes and ensemble hits that define the genre's
most tiresome cliches, occasionally borrowing shamelessly from Jerry
Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann along the way.
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| Debney |
The Relic: (John Debney) When the MPAA classifies
films with a rating, there's a category called "extreme gore" that earns
the accompanying the film an automatic "R" rating. Films like The
Relic are easy qualifiers in the "extreme gore" department, though
with so many films in the 1980's and 1990's trying to take advantage of
the same general premise of "scary monster chasing trapped humans," you
have to wonder why every variant of that equation is so popular. The
1995 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child took the same old
monster formula and applied it to a museum environment, and with
predictable turns left and right, Chicago's Museum of Natural History
becomes the arena in which trapped humans are the prey for some nasty
Brazilian monster that was formerly a colleague and now fancies the
taste of human brain matter. The film proved several things. First, it
showed that director Peter Hyams had lost the knack for the kind of
truly stimulating suspense sequences that filled Outland and
Capricorn One with greatness. Second, it definitely proved that
Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore were not the heroes you'd want
battling a monster if you were stuck in a building with them. And,
finally, despite a lengthy and illustrious career for many years
thereafter, The Relic told film score collectors that rising film
scorer John Debney hadn't quite mastered the horror genre by 1997. The
composer had made a living out of writing for Disney productions and was
in transition to mainstream releases like Liar Liar and Sudden
Death, both of which average works, while stunning listeners with a
score for Cutthroat Island that far exceeded the quality of the
film. Although anticipation for Debney and his official horror debut in
The Relic was high, the composer fell back on predictable cliches
and instrumental usage that begged for far more creativity than it would
receive, shamelessly emulating Jerry Goldsmith's Alien more often
than not. For films of The Relic's dubious quality, Debney often
underachieved, and this entry is no different. With that in mind, the
music for the movie alternates between boring and obnoxious, depending
on how much aimless noise is being generated at any given moment. A
standard orchestra with no solo standouts or unique instrumentation
performs on a bleak canvas with surprisingly minimal imagination to be
heard in the final mix, despite the composer's many attempts to utilize
those orchestral instruments in creative ways.
There are a handful of marginally clever motifs that
Debney utilizes throughout
The Relic, but none of them is given
enough development or full enunciation to be considered as the
overarching identity of the work. The "End Credits" cue motions through
these ideas with monotonous pacing, following the "Lucky Bullet"
conclusion in logically combining the score's main two identities. The
actual primary theme is a very slight, three-note theme quoted by brass
and the lowest registers of the ensemble that follows the beast, and its
most interesting incarnations come on top of the militaristic
confrontation cues in the score's latter half. This intentionally
unpleasant idea camouflages itself well amongst dissonant ramblings
because of its similarly distasteful progressions, making it rather
difficult to latch onto. A motif for the sake of mystery is used in
nearly every major cue in the film. This two-note, descending
alternation is only barely effective as a tool for continuity.
Additionally, Debney relies on a tingling and plucking string effect to
represent the awful monster's offensive nature, and while the use of
this technique is put to adequate employment here, it's somewhat of a
cliche in and of itself. None of these elements really leaves an
impression as strong as the simplistic bashing of the ensemble for the
actual attack sequences. While utilizing some unconventional piano
strikes and other percussion creativity, Debney ultimately relies
heavily on standard orchestral slashes and hits, the kind of pedestrian,
B-rate techniques that synthesizers have imitated for years. He also
liberally quotes the bold and frenetic strokes of strings that Bernard
Herrmann utilized in
Psycho, but without the intelligent
introduction or conveyance of those ideas. Everything in
The
Relic is provided at the wholesale level, whether you're forced to
tolerate generic horror surprises or countless cues of lengthy,
minimalistic voids. The score understandably never received a commercial
release (its "End Credits" suite is really all anyone needed for a
compilation of Debney's achievements), though it was the sixth of John
Debney's original series of official promotional albums in the late
1990's. Within just two years of the 42-minute promo's distribution
through soundtrack specialty outlets, it became a hot collectible, and,
like the promo of
I Know What You Did Last Summer, fetched over
$100 per copy. In 2013, La-La Land afforded the score a wider album
release, pressing over an hour of its length on a limited CD that will
easily test the tolerance levels of most listeners. To think that fans
actually paid such high sums of money for this mediocre horror venture
on the promotional album for so long is far more genuinely terrifying
that anything the music itself has to offer.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
Bias Check:
For John Debney reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.33
(in 56 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.1
(in 49,967 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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