Who'd have thought it - after scoring twelve thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five horror films in a row, Marco Beltrami made the shock decision to score Blade II, a horror film. Exactly what his career needs. In fairness, and while this is not perhaps the greatest compliment I can think of, this score is considerably better than anything else Beltrami has done in the genre in a long time. I still wouldn't exactly say it's great, but it's a step in the right direction.

Unlike Mark Isham's largely horrible techno score for the first film, Beltrami for the most part relies on the full orchestra to do its tricks, which is probably why the score sounds as decent as it does. There's no real theme to speak of or indeed all that much in the way of melody at all, but various cues that do sound a little like they could be stuck in the Library of Congress's Generic Horror Film section (don't tell me you're not aware of that section) - filed under "Mediocre Chris Young Knockoffs". Fortunately at times the score rises well above that level, such as in the thrilling, outstanding "House of Paincakes" (oh how we laughed) and "Family Feud" in which Beltrami reminds the listener of the great talent he so obviously possesses.

Beltrami more than any other composer could be slapped with an "unfulfilled promise" tag, for just three or four years ago he was probably showing more promise of taking orchestral film music into the new millennium than any of his similarly-aged peers. I'm not really sure where it all went wrong - well, he did get stuck in the horror movie rut, and still hasn't broken out, but it can't just be that - but with Blade II he is back - to an extent. Considering the album's only 33 minutes long, there's still too many cues that couldn't be considered anything other than filler music for it to be greeted as an unwavering success (and one cue - the main title - is as hideously bad as anything you could imagine) - but by and large this is an impressive return-to-form. My hope now is that Beltrami can branch out of doing these horror movies and work on more films that might offer him a chance to grow as a composer.

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