There are so many things to mock about your average fantasy movie.
For some reason, movie studios have traditionally treated fantasy films on about a level with porn (and slightly below homemade horror movies) in terms of plot, acting, dialogue, costuming, puppets, wigs, gratuitous nudity, men poking everything that moves in one way or another, and special effects (often involving dubious fluids). There are a few notable exceptions, of course, but fantasy movies are all too often embarrassingly bad.
But one cringe-inducing area rarely discussed is the music.
One of the worst offenders in recent memory was Kull the Conqueror, which actually improved my opinion of Heavy Metal in comparison.
Clearly, Kull’s “luxurious” locks should be cut into a mullet.
When it comes to fantasy movies, multi-fret guitars are worse even than multi-bladed swords.
Sadly, Ladyhawke does little better in the music department, even though it is a much better movie overall. (The real synth groove starts 1:00 minute in. The rockin’ guitars kick in at about 2:00.)
And relative production values of the films seem to have little to do with it. In comparison with Kull, for example, there’s Krull, which actually has a great score.
Sometimes, rather than horrible orchestrated music, they use remakes of popular music that are pointless and blander than cold oatmeal in a Florida buffet. Case in point:
The Craft.
And then there are movies that are on the fence (or perhaps qualify as guilty pleasures) because they are borderline musicals with mixed musical results.
Labyrinth, for example.
In many of these cases, the musical choice disrupts the period feel of the movie and jars the viewer of out of a potentially immersive experience. The synth and guitar music mentioned earlier certainly does that for me. Or you have a movie that deliberately tries to insert popular culture into a McEuropean fantasy setting.
Such was the case in Knight’s Tale.
I don’t want music that evokes a feeling of driving down the freeway in an old Trans Am T-Top, the wind blowing through your mullet and making your rat tail whip out behind you as you pump your hands in the air. I want music that evokes a mythic and magical age. Is that so much to ask?
Heck, I’d almost prefer to hear Orff’s Carmina Burana “O Fortuna” used yet again rather than another guitar solo.
In short, most fantasy movies have enough of an uphill battle. Let’s not make it worse with crappy music.
Randy Henderson stays crunchy in milk. His fiction has appeared in Alienskin Magazine, The Harrow, and From the Asylum. He likes milkshakes. He recently graduated from Clarion West. He has a robot monkey army. And most importantly he has won the prestigious “Fantasy Friday Blog for a Beer” award five times (to date). For his genre-related musings, go to his blog.
I was just watching Krull last night. I used to think the score was decent. This time it had me until the laser beam sound effects throughout and the jarring use of a major key with heroic motifs whenever they showed the Slayers on screen.
I wondered if James Horner was watching the same movie as the rest of us. It made the movie harder to watch than the main protag’s flesh-colored beard. Or the tedious use of scenery when the plot got especially thin.
Not to mention, how is their child going to rule the galaxy when they can’t even get past swords and horses?
I rather liked the music in knights tale actually; it acted as a ‘we’re not going to take this at all seriously’ signal, and mitigated a few of the more grating historical inaccuracies.
*ducks*
I always thought the music with Knight’s Tale fit because Chaucer was clearly the “pulp writer” of his day, and it just gave the movie that “pulp fiction” feel that suited it.
Of course, the movie didn’t take itself seriously, and that made it all the funnier to me.
Good points. I think my main disappointment with most fantasy films IS that they don’t take themselves seriously, because, hey, fantasy is just cheesy geek stuff, right? Which I don’t get, because when someone does make a fantasy (or scifi) movie that takes itself and its audience seriously, it is generally a box office hit.
I think Knights Tale got a cold reception from me because of that. It is not even technically “fantasy” so much as historical fiction, but at the time I watched it I may have just suffered through the Dungeons & Dragons Debacle, or some similar piece of crap that only helped to reinforce the lowest opinions of the genre, and so was not thrilled to see yet another film not taking itself seriously. Even though, in the case of Knight’s Tale, the just-for-fun style worked.
Thank the gods for Peter Jackson and JK Rowling. At least now sudios are taking the (money making potential of the) genre a little more seriously.
Basil Poledouris’s music for CONAN THE BARBARIAN is actually considered one of the finest examples of movie scoring ever written. And it almost didn’t happen…seems when Dino de Laurentiis wanted to use a soundtrack of pop music, but John Milius convinced him that it needed a full orchestral score. And that made all the difference, between a fantasy film classic, or an early 80′s version of Kull…
Here is the article on wikipedia about it.