After creating not one but two movie review features for this blog, what I've found is that there are still movies that don't quite fit. Today's post is for one of those movies, perhaps the ultimate 1990s monster movie and the closest thing to a purpose-built cult movie. I present Deep Rising- the soundtrack.
To briefly cover what I'm sure I'll go into when I get around to a real review, Deep Rising was released in early1998 by Hollywood Pictures. It was in many ways an "old school" monster/ B movie made on an unprecedented $45 million budget. The movie was directed by Stephen Sommers with a cast led by Treat Williams and Bond vixen Famke Janssen. It was a critical and commercial failure, grossing $11.4M, while also being savaged by Roger Ebert among others. Needless to say, it's one of my favorite movies of all time, but again we're looking at the music.
On that front, the filmmakers somehow lined up Jerry Goldsmith, responsible for the music for such films as Patton, Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Of these alone, Patton in particular gets my personal picks for the greatest movie theme of all time, and I was practically born a John Williams fan. It would be easy to joke that a truckload of money was involved in lining him up for Deep Rising, but it will be evident to anyone familiar with his work that the composer had a long history of slumming it in sci fi/ horror movies. He scored Logan's Run and The Omen, though those were relatively high-profile and well-funded productions for genre films of the time. He continued working on medium-budget sci-fi films like Gremlins and Innerspace through the '80s and '90s. He also worked on some genuinely obscure genre films, notably Link in 1986 (definitely due for a review). His later work has always felt to me like a revered elder looking for a last blaze of glory, and while Deep Rising was far from his last, it certainly fit the bill.
As for my experiences, the Goldsmith soundtrack is certainly a major reason I like the movie as well as I do. I had tried on and off to find it as a digital album, but only ever came up with a cover from the Cinemagic series, where I had previously turned for the Krull theme. I finally went looking for a CD, and found that it could be had in the $5 to $10 range. When I got it, I took a further interest in the insert art. Here's some more pics.
On listening to the CD, the big letdown was how short it was. All the tracks together are 32 minutes, only about 4 times as long as the cover I had purchased. It still certainly captures the quality of the Goldsmith score, perhaps better than a longer album would have. The main theme has a hint of Caribbean, adding to an atmosphere of piratical adventure. The music that accompanies the monsters' attacks have a deceptively measured, almost mechanical quality. It perfectly conveys the sense not just of mounting dread, but also of a calculating malign intelligence that becomes more apparent as the movie goes on.
What remains just as worthwhile to me is that insert. It's quite clear that those responsible for the CD were genuinely hoping to stir up interest in the movie, which is hilariously futile in hindsight. It's also all too apparent that the studio system had no clue what to do with the movie. To start with, this was a time when the art of the movie poster was dead, buried in a shallow grave and started to smell. On top of that, the ad men were obviously stymied by how to fit the movie in a genre niche. The slogans suggest a horror movie, while the photos suggest an action movie. In reality, the movie had elements of both, but neither captures the whole, because it was supposed to go above genre boundaries. As with many movies I have covered, it was an approach that might have worked ten years earlier or ten years later. Instead, the movie fell into the studio creativity vacuum of the late 1990s, where it was left in the hands of people with no better idea than to pound a square peg into a round hole and in the process present it in the blandest way possible.
That's all for now, and now I have to wind down. More to come!
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