SFT

I would also recommend The Fly II, Haunted Summer and The Dark Half, The Dark Half has just about one of the most spookily beautiful themes for orchestra and chorus I ever heard! (its the last track on the album called 'surprise'! The Dark Half!)

HELLBOUND (Saturn Award winner for Best Score) (GNP/Crescendo)

DEF-CON 4 (this is the one that first got my attention -- the Intrada CD includes excerpts from several other scores)

FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC (this is the one that finally made me a HUGE fan) (Intrada, slightly expanded from original Varese LP)

HELLRAISER (this came out a few months later and PROVED he was no flash in the pan) (Cinedisc, difficult to find now -- I've got two of em, though!)

THE FLY II (Varese)

SET IT OFF (Varese)

HARD RAIN (Milan)

URBAN LEGEND (only the promo is worth having)

HAUNTED SUMMER (Silva)

CINEMA SEPTET (Intrada double CD of some of his more obscure works, including the Emmy-nominated LAST FLIGHT OUT)

I think the Intrada site still has very cheap copies of certain of their Young releases for sale ... they were just 99 cents a pop (!) when I got them, and last time I looked, they were bumped up to $3.99 -- all are worth it. NORMA JEAN & MARILYN has some lovely tunes in it, and THE VAGRANT is as completely crazy a score as anyone's written in the past decade -- if not longer! I remember Chris being so proud of that one that he formally submitted it for an Oscar nomination, even though he knew he didn't have a shot in hell. He's said in interviews that when he lectures music students at USC, and plays bits of his own music, they're usually MOST intrigued by THE VAGRANT.)

Chris has a splendid official website:

http://www.christopher-young.com

Happy browsing! I think Christopher Young is one of the very finest composers of his particular generation, and am delighted that he's finally coming into his own. I really look forward to BLESS THE CHILD. (He felt completely O.D.'d on horror scores at one point during the late eighties/early nineties, but URBAN LEGEND proves that he hasn't run out of ideas for them yet ... he just needs a little more variety in his assignments, and now he's sure as hell getting em!)

I really had a problem with HARD RAIN when it came out, thinking Young couldn't get away from whatever the film was temped with. It's been a while since that film came out, but I think I recall the main title a super-generic Jerry Goldsmith power play. I could be wrong, and I should pull out the disc and check... BUT, I must defend my thoughts for Young's true talents. While every composer may get dogged now and again by a temp track that doesn't go away, Young has come up with a very distinctive voice over the years. Jennifer 8 happens to be one of my favorite suspense scores of his, God knows he's done enough, and Murder in the First his best dramatic score. I am most often pleasantly surprised by his ongoing output. Hopefully, he'll slow down on the cigarettes so we can be surprised for a long time to come....

PeterK

I've thought that Christopher's EARLY work is often superior than the "big" stuff he's done in recent years. I thought MURDER IN THE FIRST was a borderline offensive film, not through any fault of the composer's, but still would put that score well below some of the others he's done. Watching the main title montage of Kevin Bacon being tortured in solitary for years, and listening to this bizarre Howard Hanson/John Williams BORN ON THE 4TH melange, all I could think was, "This is the beautiful anthem for some poor guy constantly getting beaten up!" I didn't blame Chris, I blamed the ridiculous director Marc Rocco (NO relation!) (who at least had the sense to appreciate Young's work in the first place, but MURDER IN THE FIRST is a wretchedly conceived and executed picture, any way you slice it. Well, not the music and a couple of the performances, but you know what I mean.)

I thought HARD RAIN's opening was arguably overly similar to the several-years-older BAT-21, but the harmonica solo helped make it into a different animal, as far as I was concerned. The action cues that followed were among the LEAST Goldsmith-derivative Young had ever written up till then. I was pleased that he seemed to have found a kind of middle-ground between scoring an action film "Goldsmithy" (as he so often did, and as so many others still and always will do), and putting his OWN distinctive voice to it. I think he's managed to keep this up. ENTRAPMENT didn't strike me as one of his better scores in the theater (still haven't tracked down a cheap disc of it yet), but who knows why that might be? I just heard IN TOO DEEP, and I have to admit I was grossly disappointed ... one of the few really ordinary things he's ever done (that I know of, but my Christopher library is pretty comprehensive). And I couldn't help thinking that the same thing happened on IN TOO DEEP that we know happened on ROUNDERS ... Miramax wanted him to tone himself down, and ordered various rescores. Compare IN TOO DEEP to SET IT OFF, and they almost sound like different people wrote them. Then again, not having seen IN TOO DEEP, maybe that IS the score the movie wanted ... but I do expect more from him. Which I know is unfair. Nobody's 100 percent all the time.

What do I know?

I never said Young's recent action music wasn't interchangeable -- much of it is. Soooo ... how much of Goldsmith's have you heard? We've already compared notes regarding ON CAPRICORN STREET, excuse me, I mean ONE CHERRY CONTRACT, no, that's not quite right either is it, well never mind for now. (HIGH ALLEY? DAMNATION VELOCITY? EXECUTIONER CABO? THE TRAVELING BLANCO?) Anyway: For me, it's the tone, not the individual notes. Williams is just as self-derivative, and let's not even get into Barry and Elfman.

Perhaps Chris isn't even as happy in the action genre as he is in some others. URBAN LEGEND is a distinctly different score from some of the other horrors he's done. Who knows? Only he does. If he does. He writes brilliantly terse and tensile music for action films, but I'm not sure that he's emotionally that much tuned into them. It doesn't help that he hasn't done a really great action picture yet. I bet he'd do an amazing job on something that wasn't an ordinary action picture as such, e.g. LORD OF THE RINGS. (You should only hear the medieval stuff he did for a student movie back in his USC days -- or HAVE you heard it?)

On a post a while ago, someone was talking about how he likes to use anagrams of other composers names in his titles. If so, where is that, if anywhere, in these two scores?

By the way, the reason why I was not to thrilled with him before was because the only score of his I had was Entrapment, which, for a long time, has sat on my shelf almost as long as Cliffhanger. Thanks for your help.

P.S. Now that I think about it, he would be much better than Howard Shore for LOTR! Imagine how creepy that would be?!?!?! Yes, I can compare because I have been listening also to The Fly and was not particularly impressed. See ya, and thanks again!

quote:

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
I'm not sure HAUNTED SUMMER (a Silva release) is still in print.

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