A seemingly disturbed (or just mentally juvenile) young woman discovers a sorcerer/wizard who inexplicably gives her the power to cause other people and animals to spontaneously combust (still... better her than George W. Bush), and someplace between Carrie and The Fury, something obviously goes wrong with her decision-making process. Other details are sketchy. Very little is also known of European composer Geasje Palacek, who was rumored to be a composition student at the time of the film's release. While she certainly had enough skill to assemble a full orchestral ensemble and choir, her use of that group in this film leaves no doubt as to why her career failed before really getting started. There's no indication that she personally had the ability to make anything other than eardrums spontaneously combust. If there's any doubt regarding the seriousness of Spontaneous Human Combustion, Palacek clearly extinguishes that doubt in each and every cue. So disturbing is the ensemble's performance in this score that the music on album is completely intolerable. Its dissonance and atonality are so extreme that even die hard Alex North fans might combust when hearing it... Nothing like it really exists in the film music world. Looking back at the most dissonant music by North, Leonard Rosenman, and others, there has never been a score as maliciously rendered as Spontaneous Human Combustion. No thematic elements exist, nor are there any clear motifs. Pacing is erratic and crescendos often begin and end without natural boundaries. What play like wild cuts and backwards edits are seemingly written directly into the orchestra's performances. A "wall of noise" approach is offered in nearly all cues, with the volume of the conversational pieces simply reduced to lower levels. There isn't even enough distinguishing clarity to each instrumental variant to allow the score to rise above the description of random sound effects. During a scene of livestock combustion, Palacek forces what sounds like a bassoon and trombone together to produce the horrific death cry of a cow (over a bed of tacky 80's laser synth sounds, no less).

Structurally, Palacek's music differs from conventional atonal scores by not only instructing the distinct orchestral sections to perform in different keys and tempos, but even individual players in each section. There can be several French horns all performing a note apart at exactly the same moment, for instance. If you stop to think about this, it must have been a monumental task to write the actual sheet music for the players, unless, of course, she told the players to simply perform haphazardly in any direction they wanted. The resulting total mess is equivalent to telling a symphony to let their warm-up tuning session go wild and have everyone let rip with whatever they wanted at any given moment. The performances in Spontaneous Human Combustion are a little more scripted than that, with individual lines that expert ears could have fun pulling out of the noise. There are, for example, East Indian percussion and vocal performances that will remind of Ravi Shankar and Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Evidence of electronic manipulation suggests that some of these distinct lines may have been recorded separately and mixed into the ensemble either reverted (backwards) or otherwise mutilated. The actual explosion sequences (which seem to be numerous in the score... there must be a whole lot of combustion happening on screen) are treated with wild crescendos of climbing brass notes, never in any particular key, and an extremely annoying pair of flutes blasting away at their highest and loudest possible regions. Sadly, the score ends with one such ear-destroying sequence, spelling an ominous doom for the primary character of the film. The score was never released commercially on album, though it received a Romanian bootleg in the year of its release. At a length of over 70 minutes, you will be praying for your own combustion after a full listen, making Spontaneous Human Combustion a prime candidate for use as a torture tool. For the enjoyably sickening pictures of exploding animated livestock on the packaging, the score and album avoid the dreaded FRISBEE rating.  *   @Amazon.com: CD or Download