Ed Wood: Original Soundtrack Recording
To capture the story of the director ofPlan 9 from Outer Space, Howard Shore plays with '50s-style camp. On the minus side, this disc has no consistent mood and puts too much emphasis on the silliness over the more original and slightly more serious pieces. The overriding form here is "exotica," drawing obvious inspiration from Les Baxter (who was often himself a budget-horror-movie orchestrator). But Cuban noise maker Perez Prado, cult organist Korla Pandit, and Shore's own variations on "hep" get a bigger slice than the more elegant and eerie work of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, complemented by Cynthia Millar's Ondes Martenot (an early synthesizer) and Lydia Kavina's theremin. Still, Shore does a fine job re-creating phrases from old production-music tunes. The dialogue snippets are still hilarious.--Joseph Lanza