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Composed by
ELIA CMIRAL

Rating
**

Album running time
45:51

Performed by
UNNAMED ORCHESTRA
Conducted by
THOMAS BARTKE
Violin
SIMON JAMES

Orchestration
ROBERT ELHAI
THOMAS BARTKE
ELIA CMIRAL

Engineered by
JEFF VAUGHN
Music Editor
MIKE FLICKER
Produced by
ELIA CMIRAL

Released by
VARESE SARABANDE
Serial number
VSD-6474

Artwork copyright (c) 2003 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; review copyright (c) 2003 James Southall

WRONG TURN

...certainly is
A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

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.

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Tracks

  1. Dark Forest (2:03)
  2. Wrong Turn (2:11)
  3. Mountain Men (2:06)
  4. Cabin in the Woods (2:21)
  5. Adventure Begins (2:35)
  6. Mountain Men at Home (2:16)
  7. Francine Dies (1:28)
  8. Jessie (1:04)
  9. Scott Becomes Prety (1:34)
  10. Bear Trap (1:17)
  11. Escape from Cabin (1:26)
  12. Jessie Taken Hostage (2:33)
  13. Fire in Watchtower (2:07)
  14. Grim Discoveries (4:32)
  15. Are We Safe? (2:51)
  16. They Got Carly (3:41)
  17. Killing Mountain Men (4:10)
  18. We Are Alive (1:26)
  19. Three-Finger is Back (1:02)