CineFile Video

It was quite a big deal to me and all the other film geeks I know that in 2004, the American DVD label Blue Underground released a special edition version of Cronenberg’s “Fast Company” that also included on a separate disc his first two feature films, “Stereo” and “Crimes of the Future”, which up until had never been available on DVD or VHS (”Crimes” actually had been included on the Criterion Collection laserdisc of “Dead Ringers”, but how many people could actually afford the ridiculous prices those players and discs cost way back when?). The two films, while at times boring and slow, both bear the unmistakable Cronenberg stylistic stamp: body horror, vaguely “official” ficitional clinics, and horrendous narrative logic. Don’t get me wrong; I like these two a lot — in fact, “Stereo” just might be my favorite film in the Cronenberg canon altogether.

Both films have no spoken dialogue from the characters; “Stereo”; features just voiceovers from severeal different omniscient narrators, while “Crimes” intersperses short narration snippets with some electronic knob-twiddling and ambient sound effects. In each case, the narration is filled to the brim with pseudo-scientific jargon and detached delivery. Recently, I was able to grab the audio tracks from the two films and make MP3s out of them. While the films both run about 65 minutes each, I’ve condensed the audio tracks to about half that length, because both film feature extended periods of silence in-between the narration as a stylistic choice.

David Cronenberg - “Stereo” (1969, audio track)
David Cronenberg - “Crimes Of The Future” (1970, audio track)

Plot outline: A marshal in outer space (Sean Connery) assigned to a remote mining colony refuses to look the other way when miners begin dying from a deadly narcotic designed to increase their productivity (patterned on the film “High Noon”, 1952)”.

We can’t confirm it, but we’re pretty sure that at some point in the pre-production on “Outland”, director Peter Hyams said to everyone else creatively involved “Okay, this film is gonna look and sound EXACTLY like ‘Alien’, capice?” Every single frame is lit and set-designed in such a way that any scene could be spliced into “Alien” and there’d be no jump in continuity, and one of the film’s poster taglines went so far as to proclaim: “Even in space, the ultimate enemy is man”, a play on the “Alien” tag of “In space no one can hear you scream”.

The incredible Jerry Goldsmith did the scores for both “Outland” and “Alien”, and, as with the the visual design, most of the music cues are vitually interchangeable between the two films. Lying in wait on the “Outland” soundtrack, however, is “The Rec Room”, the silly New Wave-y background music for the film’s “strip club of the future” sequence! It’s reminiscent of the music Goldsmith also did for the “nightclub orgy of the future” sequence in “Logan’s Run”.

Jerry Goldsmith - “The Rec Room” (MP3)

Plot outline: You already know about this one…

Somewhere a few months ago, our fearful Cinefile leader Hadrian read the soundtrack album for “Full Metal Jacket” had on it a track where R. Lee Ermey did a boot camp rap over a cheesy ’80s backing beat. Of course we had to hear it right away…

Turns out that it isn’t so much Ermey on the mic than it is dialogue clips from the film layed over said cheesy ’80s backing beat, with a shredding guitar solo in the middle. The music for the whole film is credited to “Abigail Mead”, which is a pseudonym for Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter. Nigel Goulding is just some studio musician hack, we guess.

In addition to being on the soundtrack album, this song was released on its own as a 12″ single!

Abilgail Mead & Nigel Goulding (w/ R. Lee Ermey) - “Full Metal Jacket (I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)” 12″ (MP3)

Plot outline: “Rupert Street (Dudley Moore), a piano player and composer, decides to write a musical and marry before he reaches his thirtieth birthday. One minor problem: he’ll be 30 in six weeks…”

It’s hard to find a film fan who doesn’t go gaga over Stanley Donen’s “Bedazzled” (1967), which has Peter Cook and Dudley Moore cavorting about as The Devil and a short order cook, respectively. It’s also hard to find a film fan who’s ever sat through all of “30 Is A Dangerous Age, Cynthia”, Moore’s limp follow-up effort (without Cook) that has little of the magic and wit that made “Bedazzled” a classic. While well-intentioned, the film suffers from a cardinal sin: it’s just not funny. The one thing it shares with “Bedazzled” is that it has a wonderful score, composed and performed by Moore himself, mostly comprised of swingin’ instrumental jazz pieces. The winner of the bunch, though, is a witty vocal track called “The Real Stuff”, which makes me wonder why Moore didn’t have a complete and successful alternate career as a singer.

Dudley Moore - “The Real Stuff” (MP3)

Plot outline: “High school student turns out to be personification of Lucifer. Two arch angels in human form (as women) take him on.”

1981’s “Fear No Evil” is a goofy, slightly strange demonic possession flick notable for its rock and roll soundtrack provided mostly by Sire Records, who at the time had the Ramones, Talking Heads and the B-52’s in its roster. The punk rock theme, though, is shattered completely by the film’s end credits theme song, done by a goofy-ass deep-throated metal band called Trybe, very much in the vein of Saxon or Krokus.

Trybe - “Fear No Evil” end credits theme (MP3)