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Review of Spontaneous Human Combustion (Geasje Palacek)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you delight in extreme dissonance and atonality and
are looking for a score that will make dogs howl, enemies retreat, and
plants wilt.
Avoid it... if you value any sense of organized musical thought in your film scores.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Spontaneous Human Combustion: (Geasje Palacek) Have
you ever had a really hot date? There was an Englishman who did in the
1970's... He had taken his lady to a London disco where she suddenly
exploded while on the dance floor. The flames emanating from her body
were so intense that they shrunk her head to the size of a fist by the
time she could be extinguished. Amazingly, nobody around her was
injured. Still, a major bummer for the guy's psyche. You often find
strange things when researching the phenomenon of spontaneous human
combustion, a joyous event usually involving elderly people who blow up
in their seats, their torsos reduced to ashes while their newspaper and
cushions are barely touched. A personal favorite "SHC" event happened to
some poor chap sitting on the toilet in the 1950's; when he exploded,
his leg shot like a rocket through the floor and knocked a radiator
clean off the wall in the apartment below. More intriguing is the fact
that there are gruesome pictures of these events that are rarely seen by
the public. Treatment of spontaneous human combustion in media has
usually been restricted to cult shows like The X-Files, though a
1995 film out of Eastern Europe addressed the topic in a more
interesting way: animated horror. Very little is known about the low
budget production of Spontaneous Human Combustion outside of
information that can be discovered on the packaging of a bootleg release
of its orchestral underscore. What few accounts exist for the picture
indicate that it is a straight adult horror film that just happened to
be based in the animated genre, making anyone with common sense wonder
how many Romanian kids who went to see this film were utterly terrorized
by its contents. Comparisons to more recent animated filth place
Spontaneous Human Combustion at levels far more disturbing
than even South Park and the slew of wretched shows on late night G4
Channel programming.
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. *
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 74:13
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film, but does
feature some truly psychotic artwork from the film.
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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 Spontaneous Human Combustion are Copyright © 1995, Record 1 Co. and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 9/24/96 and last updated 5/29/06. There is something seriously wrong with this page. |
