...kind of ruined the movie. Awful, just awful music playing all the time that completely ruined the mood and had nothing to do with any of the scenes playing. What were the composer thinking? Probably not a movie about dragons, sorcerers and knights. Otherwise pretty decent 80's fantasy romp. Actors could have been less wooden also but the effects were pretty amazing for the period. Story was quite ok too.
shareI actually liked it in the more dramatic moments. I read somewhere that some original music written for Kubrick's 2001 (which was ultimately scrapped in favor of the classical soundtrack) showed up here in Dragonslayer.
shareA very few of the darker moments of the film had some good music, like the final battle with Ulric and the dragon. But other than that? Yeah. It sucked something awful. All that jingling jangling discordant flute and bell crap was just out of place.
Whores will have their trinkets.
Yeah, as soon as I saw "Music by Alex North" I went o_O. Not a fan. Years ago I bought a CD of Alex North's discarded 2001 soundtrack, and it was very obvious why it was discarded. The music at the very end when Galen and Valerian are walking off into the sunset couldn't have been more inappropriate, I thought.
shareI must disagree.
Alex North's score stands very well on its own and actually compliments the film in the scenes #1. where it is audible and #2 where it is used as intended.
It is fairly well-known that North's score was shamefully treated by the producers in post-production, being dialed down to inaudibility in many case beneath sound effects and dialogue or else randomly cut-and-pasted from one scene to another without regard to where it was intended.
Part of the reason why so many people feel the music works against the film is because the music is being heard in scenes where it was not intended by the composer. After North wrote and recorded his score, the producers turned around and took music from one scene and replaced it with music written for another. In other instances they repeated bits of cues or pasted them together for no reason. In still others, they cut out the music altogether; North wrote a series of sweeping dramatic cues to represent sequences of the dragon flying which were ultimately cut out.
Even the Main Title was remixed and dialed down, leaving it sounding weak and under-powered even in Dolby Surround.
The fault, then, lies not so much with the composer - who earned an Oscar nomination - but with the producers, who tampered with the score, robbing it of it's intended impact..
"If you don't know the answer -change the question."