So we should get a really good treatment of the film.

Great idea, but the first Star Trek was not inkeeping with what Star Trek 2 provided, humor, freindship and caring. Star Trek, was cold as space. It needed a real villian, not Vger. A man made hunk of junk. It seemed to me at one point and time during the filming of this junk, the actors would of told Robert Wise, this is crap! We are bailing out!
The music Jerry Goldsmith is excellent, great fun, if you did not know any better you would not of known that it came from such a BAD film.

The best quote from a review of Star Trek was from Time Magazine was When the slow Spaceships took off and moved slowly through space and when they finally got to their destination there was nothing to see!
Star Trek 2 should of been the First Star Trek. Thank you Nicholas Meyer.

And Arbro, Do you not have the expanded version of Star Trek?

NP: Superman, expanded **** John Williams

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A man made hunk of junk. It seemed to me at one point and time during the filming of this junk, the actors would of told Robert Wise, this is crap! We are bailing out!

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They were all having a hard time getting other work because of the usual Star Trek typecasting (which Patrick Stewart seems to have mercifully escaped). I suspect the cast would have acted in test patterns if that's all that Paramount had sent their way. Kind of sad that they needed to depend on Paramount that much.

You are right!!! Kingdom of Spiders, I think it had a better script than Star Trek.
Oh Well.

I am due to see an advanced DVD screening at Paramount in LA this November. What title it is I am unsure of, but it could very well be ST: TMP I guess... Hope so!

William Shatner received a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actor for KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS. I'd have voted him the award, all those damn tarantulas he had to be buried in throughout.

I haven't heard THE DARK, but either way KINGDOM's score was trivialized by Cardos's 1980 THE DAY TIME ENDED, which featured one of the BEST cues in Richard Band's whole career (a shame the sound quality-and the move itself-was so horrible).

To make this relevant to this discussion, it is interesting to point out (as the liner notes on Varese's LP for DAY explain) that THE DAY TIME ENDED was the 2nd score to use a combination of Analog and "new" digital recording techniques to create better sound (the sound quality of the LP is infinitely better than in the film). The 1st score to use this technique was (ta da!) STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE!

Which brings me back on-topic. I'm looking forward to this release, even though I'm not fond of the film itself. My godfather once spent way too much of his time re-editing the film himself, giving it a faster pace and calling it the "improved" version, which, I must admit, it actually was. The pacing was far better and much more tolerable... except that he BUTCHERED Goldsmith's score (although he did seem to pay attention to the music during "The Enterprise"). If Wise is really re-cutting the film, it will be an interesting comparison for me. It will also be interesting to see what happens to Goldsmith's music as a consequence...

James
NP - The Day Time Ended (Richard Band) Side 2, #5: "Finale: The Intelligence/City of Light" (this is great stuff!).

Director John "Bud" Cardos tracked both KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS and THE DARK with cues from the TWILIGHT ZONE episodes "Back There" and "The Invaders," composed by -- ta-daaa! -- that guy we saw in Detroit. I think KINGDOM has no original score. I haven't seen it in more than ten years, and might now be faster to notice other library cues Cardos might also have favored. Still, KINGDOM is tracked very well -- I particularly like the despairing movement from "Back There" that closes the movie, as we pull back and see everything wrapped in spiderwebs -- sort of one-upping the (planned, but unused) finale of THE BIRDS (the Golden Gate Bridge swathed in thousands of them).

THE DARK uses a lot of the same Goldsmith music (as does ALLIGATOR, released the following year, although that also incorporates an original score by Craig Hundley, himself a child actor on STAR TREK -- why he played your nephew, Captain. He also invented the Blaster Beam synthesizer, which Goldsmith used to such great effect in STAR TREK - TMP, and Hundley used the Blaster Beam in his ALLIGATOR score as well ... though a great deal of the final soundtrack relies on Goldsmith's "Invaders." You knew all this already, didn't you? Well, it's already typed.)

THE DARK also features some original music by Roger Kellaway, which is so stupidly written and falsely manipulative as to be fascinating. It's even worse than Kellaway's subsequent score to EVILSPEAK, which is the most blatant ripoff of the original OMEN that I've ever heard (Kellaway went so far as to lift the "Ave Satani" lyrics -- and simply mix up the words!) Kellaway basically scores THE DARK with silly hissing vocal effects, usually a solo voice whispering "DAAAAARK-NESSSSS! THE -- DAAAAAAARK!" and occasionally even "TEN-E-BRAE!" (Latin for, you guessed it, "darkness.")

You're right, the music in the end is particularly effective... until that horrible country song starts up.

Now my mind is racing with this question... would I still have said a Richard Band score (THE DAY TIME ENDED) was better than KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS if I had known that KINGDOM's music was actually by Goldsmith? I am a big Band fan, but still I wonder.... What's in a name?

So why do I mention this? Because there IS something a bit "off" about the TWILIGHT ZONE music used in both of Cardos' movies, and it sounds wrong in ALLIGATOR as well. And I don't think this because I was familiar with the episodes in question. I saw ALLIGATOR well after KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, and was downright puzzled by the use of the "Invaders" music -- naggingly familiar, where had I heard it before? And why does it clash so hard with the Blaster Beam stuff Hundley's writing? When I finally got around to seeing the original "Invaders," and hearing the Varese release of "Back There," I was not a little bit startled.

Hmm, if Shatner HAD made KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS 2, would he have managed to talk Goldsmith into scoring it? And would Goldsmith have wittily interpolated bits of the old TWILIGHT ZONE stuff, just for fun? Silly little fantasy, but it amuses me somehow.

'ey Cap'n, I assume you've heard Richard Band's TROLL. I haven't, but would be curious to. No less a personage than Douglass Fake said in an interview that he played that one a GREAT deal (that was back when it was new, but I was interested, since I'd also heard it was mainly just another OMEN knockoff.)

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Originally posted by H Rocco:
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER has one cue that sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb, Sean Connery talking with Sam Neill about their wives -- I believe Basil Poledouris scored this with a cue that we hear on the album, "Two Wives," but director John McTiernan favored his temp track -- an all-synthesizer cue from NO MAN'S LAND, ALSO by Poledouris!

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That's strange. I thought I could remember that there is NO music during that sequence...

I do have the expanded version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The sound quality of the score is one of the best I have heard from a film in 70's. Most scores of this age have some kind of hiss or shallow bass.

On the DVD of Kentucky Fried Movie, John Landis, Jim Abrahams, David and Jerry Zucker mention that, while their film was pretty much scored with library music, the one exception is the "A Fistful of Yen" sequence, which was scored by the composer of Kingdom of the Spiders. I assume after what I have just read that this refers to the songwriter. The music for the sequence was so bad it's perfect.

Hey, some friends of mine really love to bring up another William Shatner movie called The Devil's Reign, which, as I understand it also has Ernest Borgnine, Tom Skerritt and many other actors of note. I have never seen this movie. How bad is it?

Wedge: Right before ALIENS' music appears in DIE HARD, I was EQUALLY jolted by the lovely music that accompanies the sight of the millions of shreds of paper floating to the ruined street ... a reflective moment from John Scott's MAN ON FIRE! I had never seen the film, but was a major John Scott fan by the time MAN ON FIRE came out, so picked up the CD. I was surprised to hear that music, but not displeased; I think I was rather irritated with the interpolation of ALIENS, though.

I think Kamen gave an interview to the effect that he told the producer "just buy the piece by John Scott!" Either he couldn't come up with anything that satisfied them as much melodically, or had no time to finish it, I don't recall.

NP: "The End" by The Doors