: (Marco Beltrami/Danny Elfman) After the
surprisingly rousing success of the original
not long
before, Miramax sought to immediately capitalize on that asset by
rushing a sequel out to the widest release in studio history. And the
studio's plan worked, as
, still pilfering the slasher
movie genre within its own script, lured in enough youngsters to
generate a second huge payday. Five surviving characters from
and a convenient selection of fresh meat for this story
are plagued once again by a masked killer in an otherwise serene
suburban setting, suffering phone calls and knife attacks much the same.
The film franchise humor in the script is perhaps the highlight, as the
genre self-referencing was always the main attraction of the concept.
The soundtrack for the movie, however, has always remained a point of
heated debate. Also returning from the original film was composer Marco
Beltrami, who by the time of
had better developed his
style of merging synthetics with orchestra into a semblance of what fans
would hear from him for years to come. Aside from the usual interference
from song placements (which, in
, became the
representative soundtrack album for the movie), Beltrami also contended
with studio insistence upon the inclusion of music by more established
composers in the picture. These deviations most notably included an
original piece, "Cassandra Aria," written by Danny Elfman in his usual
brooding,
-like form for the play of the main
character, Sidney, in the story. But more controversy stemmed from the
studio's decision to replace Beltrami's theme for the Deputy Dewey
character with the theme from Hans Zimmer's
. Even
though both ideas borrowed heavily from the same Ennio Morricone Western
twang, the studio claimed that the Zimmer temp track performed better
with test audiences.
Beltrami didn't learn about the decision to keep the
Zimmer temp track in the final cut of
Scream 2 until the
premiere, and he was incensed by the idea that the studio would spend as
much money to license one Zimmer track as it had paid him to produce his
entire original score. He committed a rookie sin by going public with
his immense dissatisfaction, prompting blowback from the studio and
filmmakers. While one senses that Beltrami still disapproves of the
Zimmer situation in
Scream 2, especially given that his music for
Dewey was indeed perfectly adequate and more in tune with the rest of
the score, he capitulated enough to remain on the crew of the next two
sequels, and his material for Dewey would see the light of day in
Scream 3. While influences from Elliot Goldenthal, Christopher
Young, and Eric Serra sparked the music for
Scream to a degree,
these ingredients are played to a greater effect in
Scream 2. The
maturation of Beltrami's blend of electronics and symphony is also
heard, especially in his sharp applications of the latter. The increased
music budget and thus larger ensemble really makes a difference in the
forcefulness of the work, Beltrami pulling more ideas from Goldenthal's
sophisticated palette as the franchise became more robust in its
orchestral prowess. The lovely theme for Sidney returns, though not as
impressively as in
Scream 3 and relegated to just a single track
on the 1998 album featuring the first two scores. Its introduction in
"Maureen Steals the Show" for the full ensemble is sensational. Along
with the straight female vocal expression in "Your Lucky Day" and the
twangy version in "Joel Quits," you hear the theme tortured on high
choir at the end of "Showdown" and hinted during several conversation
cues. It becomes quite pretty, in fact, in the flute, harp, and piano
performances during the second half of "Sid and Dewey Talk," the
composer taking that and other opportunities to twist the phrasing of
the theme and even add some additional notes for melodramatic
effect.
While Beltrami maintained this theme and certain other
motifs throughout all four of his scores for the franchise, the general
demeanor for Dewey is perhaps the most recognizable aspect from
Scream 2, as well as the most maligned. Building out of the style
in "Trouble in Woodsboro," the spaghetti Western holdover from the days
of Morricone's dusty classics are in full force in
Scream 2, and
their bass and guitar antics culminate in some synthetic whistling in
"Dewpoint and Stabbed" and a powerful rendition in "Sundown Search." The
opening moments of "Sid and Dewey Talk" are reprised at the outset of
the victorious performance of Sidney's theme at the end of
Scream
3. On the longer 2016 album for
Scream 2, Beltrami sends this
idea off in "Scream 2 Theme" after a snippet of Sidney's theme. For
Beltrami enthusiasts, this material has the added perk of serving as a
foreshadowing of his superior venture into the spaghetti Western genre
for
3:10 to Yuma more than a decade later. Unfortunately for
Beltrami, the most popularly memorable music from
Scream 2 wasn't
actually his. Elfman composed a frenzied, churning, brutal,
choral-enhanced three minutes called "Cassandra Aria" for the film, a
piece in much demand until its release with Beltrami's fuller score in
2016. It's pure Elfman horror music in its twisted tone, though it
coincidentally resembles David Arnold's alien theme in
Independence
Day in its latter half. There is certainly a distracting element to
the sudden infusion of pure, vintage Elfman style into this score. And,
again, much of the music for Dewey was supplanted in
Scream 2 by
Duane Eddy's guitar performances for
Broken Arrow, a replacement
generally considered effective in the film but, as mentioned previously,
rather unnecessary. It's wise still not to ask Beltrami his opinion
about that affair. Aside from these recurring motifs, perhaps the most
obvious returning element in this score is the reframing of "Trouble in
Woodsboro" into "Introducing Gale Again." Otherwise, stock horror
techniques abound in the less accessible portions.
In general, the soundtrack for
Scream 2 features
a much broader personality because of all of its disparate sounds. It
should be mentioned, however, that the early Beltrami cues in
Scream
2, those that reintroduce familiar characters, offer a solid
foundation for the resolution music in
Scream 3, and some of
Beltrami's electronic textures here are actually quite appealing despite
their abrasive attitude ("Check Out the News" and "Introducing Gail
Again"). The two "Showdown" cues also offer some of the composer's best
symphonic material from the franchise. On album, the first two scores
were provided together on a short product in 1998. That Varèse
Sarabande album contains only 12 minutes from
Scream and 17
minutes from
Scream 2, one of the label's more controversial
capitulations to the fees of the musicians' unions at the time. Without
Elfman's track, that album has always been dissatisfying, and compared
to the 30 minutes eventually available from the label for
Scream
3, this duo album was only barely adequate. In 2011 and 2016,
respectively, Varèse offered standalone, fuller presentations of
Scream and
Scream 2, the latter containing the Elfman
material across two tracks but not needing to feature the
Broken
Arrow borrowings readily available on that score's albums. In 2022,
the same label re-issued the 2016 presentation as part of a 6-CD set of
all four Beltrami scores for the franchise. On the 6th disc containing
bonus material, however, the product offers five extra Beltrami cues of
a total of three minutes in length. These tracks contain stingers and
ambience of little consequence; more interesting is the inclusion of
three additional, generic horror cues by Kevin Manthei meant to serve as
the score of the "Stab" movie within
Scream 2. On its own, this
score is a more engaging experience than that for
Scream, but it
will continue to pose challenges for those not in tune with the
franchise's occasionally unique but often tired horror stance. A custom
combination of all four Beltrami scores' highlights into one 75-minute
presentation remains the best solution.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Marco Beltrami reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.75
(in 28 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 2.8
(in 19,011 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
