The craze for 3-D movies in the early 1980s was mercifully short-lived.  One of the more bizarre entries was Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone in 3-D.  From the title alone, it sounds like the kind of film an 8-year-old might make with a camcorder and some of his friends.  Unfortunately this feeling isn't dissipated in the slightest by actually watching the film.  Rather improbably, it was produced by Ivan Reitman.  Having already worked with Elmer Bernstein on Animal House, Stripes, Meatballs and Heavy Metal, the producer did rather well to entice the composer to work on what Reitman described as being "a space adventure with a sense of humour" (though the joke is rather lost on me).

Bernstein was unfortunate enough to work on some truly execrable films during his career.  It goes without saying that he treated them with absolute professionalism and always gave them a touch of class they didn't deserve, but sometimes one can't help but think his music betrays the rather modest origins of the images it was composed to accompany.  For Airplane!, the composer wrote a score which was deliberately designed to sound like what a high school student impersonating Elmer Bernstein might have written; for Spacehunter, it's tempting to say that he achieved the same thing while probably not trying to do so.

Despite this, it is difficult not to be swept up in the sheer exuberance of it all; Bernstein's music is nothing if not enthusiastic.  It is anchored around a propulsive, driving main theme which sounds a bit silly, but is insanely catchy.  It's liable to bring a smile to the listener's face every time it appears through the score.  The rest of the score is pretty diverse material, though it does have one thing in common - it's all rather silly.  With rather primitive synth sounds cropping up pretty frequently, an occasionally-bizarre use of the ondes martenot, some extremely melodramatic action music and even some good old-fashioned romance, one suspects Bernstein had a lot of fun writing the score, not taking it overly seriously, but to be honest it doesn't sound like he was all that comfortable writing this sort of thing.  For fans of the composer, all of his usual trademarks are here in spades, but it's truly a very long way from his finest work.