April 3: National Film Score Day- Write about a movie that has a great score.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

Dragonslayer (1981) and Trancers (1984): Two Great Film Scores but Only One in Service of Its Film

The mating of visuals to music can be transcendent. Think of how many movies, even stone-cold masterpieces, wouldn’t be as effective without their iconic scores by musical geniuses such as Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Miklos Rozsa, Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Vangelis, Danny Elfman, and, of course, the greatest film composer of all time, Ennio Morricone.* And we can’t forget groups who did scores, like Goblin, Tangerine Dream, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Who, Nine Inch Nails, and Queen. Music has always been a part of movies even in the silent era. 

A great score can elevate a movie or hurt it. My fundamental maxim for judging the effectiveness of a score is whether I’m paying more attention to the score than the film itself. During my prime theater-going days, I went to see Dragonslayer, a now-forgotten film from 1981, a year packed with classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II, Altered States, Flash Gordon,** The Evil Dead, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Ms. 45, and Possession. I’d read in reviews before buying my ticket that the score by legendary composer Alex North was exceptional. My expectations were high.

So there I sat on opening day in a Philadelphia grindhouse—not one of the scarier ones—enjoying Dragonslayer, a decent enough film. And the reviewers were right: Alex North’s score was fantastic. (It was later nominated for an Academy Award.***) The score was so good that it took me right out of the film’s universe. The music had transformed this urban shithole, with urine-stained floor, broken seats, and tattered velvet curtain, into Carnegie Hall. (If only it could have literally done that—and changed the wino snoring next to me into a tuxedoed high-society type offering me a single malt Scotch.)

It was then that I realized that this was not a good thing. All the effort that had gone into creating that awesome-looking dragon had been lost on me. I’d closed my eyes and was zoning out to the music. While it was a classic symphonic score, it wasn’t the usual rousing John Williams stuff. Instead, it was more brooding. North had incorporated complex lines with counterpoint and some atonality. It’s not that the score was inappropriate to the action. It’s just that it was so much better than the film itself that it became a distraction and put a damper on my viewing experience. Dragonslayer’s score, though outstanding, does no service to the film it supports.

But sometimes—more accurately, rarely—a film with a few good elements that would otherwise be forgotten is improved so much by an unexpectedly great score that both the film and its score live on, each beloved. Case in point: Trancers (1984) a film I first watched on home video. 

On paper, Trancers doesn’t look like much: a low-budget mash-up of Blade Runner and The Terminator that Charles Band and his Empire International Pictures dumped into Chicago and LA theaters to make a few bucks before the VHS cassettes hit the shelves at Blockbuster. But Empire made exploitation films that were a cut above the rest, so it looked good, courtesy ace cinematographer Mac Ahlberg. And it had some other good things going for it: stand-up comedian Tim Thomerson, perfectly cast as Jack Deth, the futuristic gumshoe; future Best Actress winner Helen Hunt as his juvenile love interest; and a funny, clever screenplay from Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo. That duo went on to write even more great stuff, including Zone Troopers (1985), Eliminators (1986), and The Wrong Guys (1988) for Empire; The Flash (1990) for television; The Rocketeer (1991) for Disney; and Da 5 Bloods (2020) for Spike Lee, which was released after De Meo’s death. These things make Trancers memorable, to be sure, but you’ll be blown away by the score by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder.

Like the score in many 80s films, the Trancers score used the premier electronic instrument of the day, the Fairlight synthesizer. The main theme, which serves as the musical motif throughout the film, is simplicity itself: an initial burst of synthesizer whine, followed by a slow, haunting melodic line in a minor key supported by swelling harmonies. It’s mournful mood music that stands in contrast to the film’s action scenes. The film may be part science fiction, part noir, but the music emphasizes the noir. Like the Dragonslayer score, it calls attention to itself, but does so in a way that doesn’t violate my rule. Instead of distracting, it engages.**** George Bernard Shaw once said, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. To this day, I can’t listen to the Trancers soundtrack without being moved.

Trancers was so successful on home media that it became a franchise with seven installments.***** Charles Band’s brother Richard, Empire’s house composer, reworked Davies and Ryder’s compositions through Trancers III before the uneven series turned to other composers and music with lesser effect. Recently, there’s even been talk of a Trancers TV series. Jack Deth may live on, abetted, I hope, by the original Trancers score.

But, you ask, “Isn’t the Trancers soundtrack just a knock-off of Vangelis’s opening theme from Blade Runner?” It’s true that Trancers and Blade Runner are both science-fiction films with synthesizer scores. The difference is that the Trancers score, even if it was inspired by Blade Runner, is better. If you weren’t scorched by my hot take there, here’s a molten-lava take: The Trancers score is among the best movie scores of all time. If you don’t believe me, some kind soul has put together a 10-hour loop of the theme, which you can listen to on YouTube.

There you have it: two genre films, Dragonslayer, a big-budget studio film with high ambitions, and Trancers, a low-budget exploitation film with modest ambitions, both with excellent scores. But only one score does what it’s supposed to do, and it does so beautifully. I want the Trancers theme played at my funeral as I head down the line to the next life.

* For my money, the scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with Eli Wallach as Tuco running through the cemetery to “Ecstasy of Gold” by Maestro Morricone is the greatest music cue in any movie ever. If perfection can exist in this world, this is it. 

** If you read any discussion of movie soundtracks mentioning the rock group Queen, you’ll always sing aloud “Flash! A-ah… Savior of the universe!” See? You did just now. It’s an immutable law of the universe.

*** North received 15 Academy Award nominations, including one for the American standard “Unchained Melody,” which he wrote early in his career for the film Unchained. If that was the only thing he’d ever written, I’d say he had an amazing life.

****  Just last month, Band released to YouTube a black-and-white remastering of Trancers. The noirish score complements the monochrome images even more brilliantly.

*****Six features and one 20-minute short. The short, originally intended as a segment of the Empire portmanteau film Pulse Pounders, was shot in 1988 but was unreleased until 2013. It fits between Trancers and Trancers II on the series’ timeline and is lovingly called “Trancers 1.5” by fans.

April 2: Get Me Another- A sequel or a movie way too similar to another film.

Anne Goursaud may be known for editing Francis Ford Coppola’s films Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Outsiders and One from the Heart, but she also had a run of directing in the 90s, working with Alyssa Milano to make this and another erotic film, Embrace of the Vampire, before also directing Love In Paris, which was released in the U.S. as Another 9 and 1/2 Weeks and brought back Mickey Rourke as John Gray and giving him a new love interest played by Angie Everhart. As you can imagine, it did not do well.

She also made this a sequel to Poison Ivy by name only. Milano is Lily Leonetti, a girl from Kalamazoo who has come to California to learn to be an artist. She moves in with Tanya (Kathryne Dora Brown), Bridgette (Victoria Haas) and Robert (Walter Kim), three fellow students who each have their own unique artistic skills. She soon finds a diary and nude photos of a girl named Ivy, who she becomes obsessed over, wishing that she could be as fearless as her.

Those photos: Jaime Pressly confirmed in 2008 that they are her, saying “Drew plays Ivy in the first Poison Ivy film, and in Poison Ivy II, Alyssa Milano plays the art student who moves into Ivy’s old room in a house with other students. She finds a diary and pictures of Drew’s character in a closet. The pictures are supposed to be of Drew, but they’re of me, though you never see my face.”

Pressly is the lead in the next movie, another unconnected effort, Poison Ivy: The New Seduction.

As she takes classes from Donald Falk (Xander Berkeley, Christopher in Mommie Dearest), he tries to seduce her, all while she’s babysitting his daughter Daphna (Camilla Belle), becoming friends with his wife Angela (Belinda Bauer) and falling in love with fellow student, the complicated sculptor Gredin (Johnathon Schaech). By the end of the movie, she’s changed so much that he’s fallen out of love with her, the teacher tries to assault her during Thanksgiving dinner, and his daughter runs into traffic.

This may be the most 90s movie to ever exist, feeling like Delia’s catalogue becoming a sentient being through Hot Topic. There’s one song that sounds so much like Portishead that I was convinced it was a remix I had never heard before. Monks chant over nearly every song, and I’m shocked that nobody shops at Wet Seal in this. This movie goes to the mall, right?

Anyway, the married art teacher gets so enraged over Alyssa Milano that he tries to shove her out the window. Her boyfriend—who came back to her—saves her at the last minute. She stays in California, but how can they return to art school?

This would be Milano’s last movie with nudity, but perhaps two was enough for most teenage 90s boys. Maybe the internet got in more homes and they learned that. they didn’t need to go to the video store to see nude women. Alyssa Milano had bigger and better things to do. As for the series — well, the title — there would be two more that I will get to.

April 1: Drop A Bomb- Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!

I’m obsessed not just by flops but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Hollywood wanted to figure out how to get the kids into theaters. Easy Rider was a hit, so they financed movies like The Last Movie, Head,  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Skidoo, Zabriskie Point and so many more.

This felt like a can’t miss: the novel Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg using the name Maxwell Kenton. They got paid $500 by Olympia Press, the same people who printed the first edition of Lolita. They wrote it chapter by chapter, trading things back and forth. They were amazed that it became a big deal, as Hoffenberg said, “Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So, right away, I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.”

Candy Christian is a Midwestern girl who just wants to make people happy. Of course, being an eighteen-year-old and gorgeous blonde, most of them want to have sex with her, then own her. She wants to make love to the gardener, but that leads to her father nearly dying from a concussion and adventures that will take her around the world.

Originally, Frank Perry—who directed The Swimmer—was going to make this, and Hayley Mills would play Candy. Her father wouldn’t let her play the role, so Christian Macquand got the rights. He’d just helped Marlon Brando buy his island—Brando’s son was named for him—and that got the great actor on board, as well as other big-time box office names.

In Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, Southern said that the director “disappointed me by casting a Swedish for the lead role, which was uniquely American and midwestern. He thought this would make Candy’s appeal more universal. That’s when I withdrew from the film.”

That Swedish girl is Ewa Aulin, who is naturally attractive and had already been in the Tinto Brass giallo Col cuore in gola and Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg. Aulin would only be in one other movie that U.S. audiences may see, Start the Revolution Without Me, before appearing in her husband John Shadow’s Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion and Italian films including The Double, When Love Is Lust, Legend of Blood Castle, Death Smiles on a Murderer and Una vita lunga un giorno. By 23, she had tired of acting, divorced Shadow, and met real-estate developer Cesare Paladino. She had two daughters and became a schoolteacher.

Buck Henry took over the script, and the movie got made.

The film starts with Candy daydreaming in her father’s (John Astin) class; she soon falls for the charms of the poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton), who is too drunk to make love to her. The gardener, Emmanuelle (Ringo Starr), attacks her, and she gives in; when his family finds out — he was about to be a priest — they are attacked by his sisters Lolita (Florinda Bolkan in her first movie), Conchitya (Marilù Tolo!) and Marquita (Nicoletta Machiavelli!). Her father gets a brain injury and she goes off with his brother (also Astin) and his wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli), but not before she’s nearly impregnanted by Brigadier General Smight (Walter Matthau) and lusted after by the man who saves her father’s life, Dr. Abraham Krankheit (James Coburn), and filmed by Jonathan J. John (Enrico Maria Salerno). Oh yeah- the doctor’s nurse is Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg.

She meets many men — a hunchback (Charles Aznavour), a guru (Brando, who its said tried to have sex with her for real on camera) and another guru who enlightens her before its revealed that it’s her father and yes, they have just had sex — and by the end, wanders through a field of hippies and flies into space.

Southern said, “The film version of Candy is proof positive of everything rotten you ever heard about major studio production. They are absolutely compelled to botch everything original to the extent that it is no longer even vaguely recognizable.”

Brando said that this was the worst movie he ever made. But man, this excerpt from Marlon: A Portrait Of The Rebel As An Artist by Bob Thomas is just insane: “Brando, of course, wanted his portion of the script rewritten. The screenwriter was Buck Henry, a gifted young comedy stylist who had written The Graduate for the screen. Brandovisitedt Henry at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris accompanied by the French moneyman for Candy, Peter Zoref, a conspiratorial-looking man who wore dark glasses indoors and out. The two visitors found Henry suffering from food poisoning. Henry tried to defer the conference, but Brando insisted on continuing, even while the writer went to the bathroom. While Henry retched, Brando shouted comments about how the comedy elements of his sequence could be heightened. There was a brief silence from within, and Brando opened the bathroom door to find Henry nearly unconscious, hunched over the toilet. Brando lifted the slender writer into his arms, carried him into the bedroom, and laid him out on the bed. Brando sat beside him and continued reading from the script and making suggestions to increase the hilarity. Zoref remained stolid behind his dark glasses, occasionally puffing on a cigar. A knock came on the door, and a waiter entered to remove the dinner tray. He stopped and surveyed the scene with open mouth: an (alleged) American gangster sitting in a chair like a stuffed figure, a thin corpse stretched out on the bed, a famous movie star sitting on the bed and guffawing over pages he was reading. The waiter slowly turned and walked out the door, closing it quietly behind him.”

This is the kind of movie that today gets one-star hate reviews by hip kids on Letterboxd who can’t be bothered to write much more than a sentence. It didn’t fare that well when it was released, either. But man, it’s a mess, a glorious mess, but one that has Coburn being incredible, famous people acting like morons and Aulin being some kind of android angel who has floated into this movie and bewitched everyone. She married Shadow while making this, a rock star who would one day write the 3D Matt Cimber martial arts movie Tiger Man.

So yeah, it’s a mess, but I love it for that. This is from a time when people were not afraid to fail and would throw money at projects that made no sense. Hollywood emerged from years of musicals and Westerns to try and become cinema, only to fall into blockbusters. But this emerged, a movie shot in France and Italy that looks luscious and yet is dumb throughout, a perfect blend of overindulgence and underwatched.

You can watch this on Tubi.