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FILMTRACKS.COM
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Review of The Relic (John Debney)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
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.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. **
TRACK LISTINGS:
1997 Promotional Album:
Total Time: 42:26
2013 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 65:24
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert of the 1997 promo contains musings about childhood nightmares, a
synopsis of the movie, a brief overview of the career of director Peter Hyams, and a
list of some of Debney's other scores. That of the 2013 product features detailed
information about the film and score.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from The Relic are Copyright © 1997, 2013, Promotional, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 11/5/99 and last updated 3/2/13. |
