"Evanescence" and other [i]terrible[/i] music in the movies - Page 2

It may be dated but it's catchy. Up there with Buckaroo Banzai.

Maybe Ghostbusters 2 just SEEMS shitty because it has such shitty music? And uh, like 20 minutes of baby closeups. Never mind.

Seconded. I actually really liked the scoring on that one.

As far as soundtracks that didn't work.... hmmm. The Ring is still a deep personal pain... particularly compared to the score on the original.

Hans Zimmer's score for The Ring was fantastic. It's a shame it's never been released on CD.

I might agree with you were it not for the flawness, nightmare inducing subtleties of the music on the Japanese original.
Next to them, the laboured efforts of the remake fail to impress me, and I hold it up as one of two aspects on which said remake failed (the other being visual imagery)

I guess I'm gonna get strung up for that as well, since I find Verbinski's remake a much more solid and effective than the original--especially in terms of visual imagery.

As far as I've always been concerned, what it had in better effects and budget it lost dramatically in simplicity, atmosphere, subtle direction and the lack of all superfluous plots involving horses.
My test here is that I failed to find the remake any way frightening, bu which I cannot but hold it lacking, the original still being one of the most effectively frightening films I have yet encountered.
It's all about letting imagination build up rather than throwing CGI at the problem. And not showing that laughable face during the final climax.

Mind you, I liked Rings.

I'm with you there, dude. Maybe it's just the fact that i saw the remake first, but i found the original to be quite lame, compared to it. The imagery was too nuclear-bomb-centric, which i guess is kind of a thing for the Japanese, and there was way too much spiritual mumbo-jumbo... not to mention the fact that in true asian style, the heroine was portrayed as a simpering nitwit who needed her boyfriend to do all the heavy lifting.

And while i don't really recall the music over the original, i remember the remake's soundtrack to be quite haunting.

I saw the original, first... but still, horses.
I'll take spiritual mubo-jumbo over random horses any day.
The remake's imagery was... frankly, a mess. Too many details, too many unsubtle bits that added nothing. Sucked all the horror out for me.
The originals may have had echoes of a bomb drop, but since much of it was based on an erutping volcano (true to the original book, there) that's entirely understandable. The remake didn't base its imagery on anything as coherent.

Yeah, because spirituality in a film about the ghost of a psychic who has become the disembodied spirit of pure rage is really jarring. The starkness of vision is what makes the film work, it builds up tension and dred through mise en scene and subtle set design, as well as a few Sadako in the back of shot moments, instead of relying on jump scares and CGI bugs/horses.

Thank you.

Actually it kind of is, when it's as silly as it was in the original.

And frankly, I have no idea in hell how somebody could find the original scarier than the remake. I appreciate the notion that subtle is often more effective than glaring, but to say that the remake had nothing but jump scares, as if it was some teen horror flick, is seriously undervaluing it. In the viewing that i attended several people actually had to be pulled out of the cinema crying because it effected them so greatly.

But maybe it all just depends on which one you watch first.

I'd have more sympathy were it not for the horses.
They were sillier.
(The irritating thing is that the novel had a better plot than either version. More like Cronenburg than anything else. Ah, well)

The remake still had some good ideas and subtlety to it- just not as much, and fluffed up the two most crucial features of any horro film when compared to the original- visuals and audio.
Sure, the soundtrack on the remake was haunting. The original's was frightening and alarming. I know which of the two I'd opt for.

Well yeah, the shock of Sadako finally doing something is a visceral nightmare. If you've seen it the impact is lessened, which is why whichever you see first tends to stick with you. Although for my money Sadako crawling out of the TV and across the floor is far more terrifying than Samara's quick teleport.

The world of the Ringu is just steeped in msyticism, if you can't dig that then that's fine. However that is not the films fault, it's like not liking LotR because it has too much Magic.

Plus, showing the entire face in the final sequence= bad.
Robbed all the fear from what was beginning to look like a decent remake of said scene.
Even if nothing else I'd said applied, that alone would make the original superior for me. You don't make your big finish laughable.

The teleportation took me out of the film, it robbed her of any real psyhicality and substance. It just looked like the guy was getting killed by the embodiment of bad TV reception.

In all fairness, that's a possible interpretation.

Especially since the final scene wasn't in the novel at all, and was inspired by Poltergeist and Videodrome.

Darnit, now I'm getting happy mental images of a Cronenburg version of Ring /Spiral that ran with the virus aspect.

I love the trilogy of books, Sadako in print is such an awesome concept.

I liked that teleport. She killed her victims via the TV anyway, and the blip not only looked like bad TV reception, it also showed how her victims couldn't merely run out of the room from the slowly crawling wet girl (the original has a mild case of slow moving killer syndrome, something I've always hated). I thought the way she moved and crawled were basic visual extentions of the fact that she just crawled out of the TV.

And it showed her face? So what? What's laughable about that? Or are you talking about showing the face of her victim? Because if it's the latter, Rick Baker's makeup on that was also phenomenal.

I guess I'm biased towards the remake because I saw it first, and didn't have the stigma of wanting it to adhere to the original. The horse part scared the piss out of me, as did the climbing out of the TV (which I did not see coming). By the by, the horses do make sense, considering Samera grew up on a horse ranch and was locked away in the barn with them. Horses have a sixth sense about people, and whatever they consider a threat they try to run away from (hence all the horses breaking free and trying to swim off the island). The horse in the ferry senses the curse on Rachel and freaks out. Not random. Just a different story.

And finally--what jump scares? Other than one or two quick cutaways, I don't know of any "jump" scares. There's no scene where she investigates something in the dark only for it to be a cat, or her boyfriend. The film is very deliberately paced, and I think it's a very effective--and very creepy--ghost story.

Now, if you want to put Ring 2 under the microscope, go for it--that was an incoherent piece of shit.

But whatever. In any case, Zimmer's score is fantastic, even divorced from whatever subjective opinions we have on the actual film.

Ring really is down to what you watched first. If you watched Ringu, then the remake lacks the metaphyiscal aspects and creeping fear, if you watched the Remake Ringu is almost glacial in its pacing.

I agree with everything G-dude said about the remake.

BUT

Must I mention Vanilla Ice's laughable cameo in THE SECRET OF THE OOZE to put this thread back on track? How about when the turtles break into a choreographed dance right after they defeat the last of the foot soldiers...

GO! GO! GO! GO!

It made her look like an irascible old woman crossed with a chimp. Compared to that eye in the original, I'm finding inferior imagery.

I was, however, agreeing with you about the teleport. It;s one of the aspects of the remake I liked.

Which, as a plot change to make from the original, makes no sense whatsoever.
What was Verbinski thinking?

Here, however, is where I ruin my credibility by admitting I prefer The Ring Two (which wasn't, in fact, a remake)

Watching Silent Hill yet again, while I still love most of the score, I only just noticed that the last piece of credits music is... dull. And rubbish. And evocative of nothing in particular.

Agreed. I liked a lot of the music in SILENT HILL(one of the few things I liked), but the song at the end just felt like a song from a video game. It'd be like someone using Final Fantasy music, it just sounds bad.

Who else is with me when I say I'd bet $20 that THE COVENANT will have some horrible Evanescence-esque rock it it? Just look at the commercials.