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Artwork copyright (c) 2003 Twentieth
Century Fox Film Corporation; review copyright (c) 2003 James Southall
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WRONG TURN ...certainly
is
Judging from the pictures on the album, Wrong Turn seems to be about
girls wearing revealing outfits walking around woods. I'm sure there must
be a little more to it than that, though Elia Crmiral's score doesn't suggest
much in the way of thrills. Cmiral's career as a film composer doesn't seem to have contained too many
highlights. After his breakthrough score, Ronin - which worked very
well in the underrated movie but didn't make for a great album - the only other
notable film he scored was Battlefield Earth, whose music was just as
execrable as the film. Lately, he seems to have been scoring various
low-budget, low-profile horror films - mostly for synths - but very few of which
have seen score releases. Wrong Turn is a much bigger score, for a
full orchestra, and Varese have released it to the buying public. There are essentially four approaches a composer could take to scoring a
horror movie, three of which were pioneered by Jerry Goldsmith - there's the
cold, clinical maximise-the-chills approach of Alien; the Satanic chorus
approach of The Omen; and the massive, gothic horror approach of Poltergeist.
The fourth approach was not pioneered by Goldsmith, but is sadly the one that
most other film composers seem to use - bland orchestral murmorings for 95% of
the score with stings put in strategic places in an attempt to shock.
Sadly - if not unsurprisingly - Cmiral went for option four. That's basically all the album is - it plods along without doing anything for
a few minutes, then has a few bars of very loud brass and strings, then reverts
back. What keeps it from being quite so bad as most scores of its type is
that there are a few genuinely high-quality tracks thrown in, such as the folksy
"Adventure Begins" and reasonably exciting "Escape from
Cabin" (the use of definite and indefinite articles is clearly not favoured
by Cmiral) which actually features some pretty striking use of electronics. Despite the few good moments, there is just far too much deadly-dull material
on the album and I'm not sure exactly who it might appeal to. I'm
impressed by Cmiral's integration of electronic elements, which seems better
than many recent efforts by other film composers, but it's highly difficult to
recommend Wrong Turn on that alone. Buy this CD by clicking here!
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