| In Cinecocktail 4: The Italian Horror Show, Beat Records gathers nearly two dozen tracks from 14 Euroshock and giallo films of the 70s and 80s, and pairs them up with an excellent hour-long DVD documentary entitled “Hanging Shadows: Perspectives on Italian Horror Cinema” (the DVD is all-region but PAL formatted, so a region free or other PAL-able player will be needed to watch it). The Italian horror cinema of the 70s was an amazing canvas for remarkable film music, in most cases playing against the action with incredible beautiful music rather than providing seemingly requisite “horror music.” Drawn from pop, lounge, jazz, and rock idioms, these scores, or at least their more sublime moments, are rich in passion and texture. Opening with two lovely cues by Ennio Morricone, from 1982’s Extrasensorial (Blood Link) and 1971’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, the collection is off to a fine start. Both of these are lyrical melodies, the former contrasting tense strokes of violins against an exquisite array of woodwind figures, the latter emphasizing the genre’s (and the composer’s) signature use of female voice. Nico Fidenco’s rhythmic motif for 1979’s Zombie Holocaust is a cool wordless vocal riff that proceeds as a kind of restful march, languidly patrolling the wildlands. The texture and tonality provides a compelling chorale accompaniment for this vibrantly graphic zombie film. “Resurrection” from the same film adds a chilling synth rumble and ghostly voicings over a primitive drumbeat to evoke an inescapable apprehension, while ‘Zombie Parade. Fabio Frizzi’s rock-based conjuring for the films of Lucio Fulci, as in 1984’s Manhattan Baby (aka The Possessed), proffer a slightly harder edge than Morricone’s transcendently gorgeous melodies of the 70s and earlier 80s, but still harbor an eloquence that is quite stirring. Frizzi’s “Suono aperto” from Fulci’s L’Aldilà (1981, Beyond) is a moody orchestral track, somber and unsettling but ultimately very attractive. Francesco de Masi’s music for Fulci’s Lo Squartatore di New York (1982, The New York Ripper) is represented by the melancholy horn intonations of “Fay,” a quiet and introspective inner-city jazz cue, reprised and extended with a cool echoing riff a few tracks later in “New York, One More Da”) The somber organ tonalities of 1974’s L’Anticristo from Morricone and Bruno Nicolai are familiar entries in collections like this but still resound with a haunting diabolism. Australian composer Simon Boswell’s drumkit raps out a consistent jazzy drum rhythm while a series of sinewy chords and breathy violin intonations hover about above it in “Sharp Groove” from Michele Soavi’s Deliria 1987, aka Stage Fright), while his “Stairway to Hell” from the same picture generates a quite likable raucous rock rhythm. Morricone returns with his fragile female vocal song “Veni Sancte Spiritus” from Damiano Damiani’s Il Sorriso del Grande Tentatore (1974, The Temper). Walter Rizzati provided an especially poignant piano melody for “Tema Bambino” from Fulci’s Quello villa accanta dl cimitero (House by the Cemetery, 1981), and also provided a dance rock number, “April Night,” for The New York Ripper, included here as the album’s closer. Less interesting selections include Alessandro Blonksteiner’s vague music from Antonio Margheriti’s savage Apocalypse Domani (1980, Cannibal Apocalypse), represented by two tracks, Piero Montanari’s two moaning synthy-choir cues from La Casa 3: Ghosthouse (1988, haunting but clichéd electronica), Carlo Maria Cordio’s pair of overly synth-laden cues from Raptors (1987, aka Zombi 5), and Stefano Mainetti’s hard rocking “The Sound of Fear” song from Fulci’s Zombi 3 (1988) But they are perhaps less known than some of the other cues, and their album releases issued by Beat during the late 90s and early 2000s have mostly gone out of print. The sequencing of the album is quite good, beginning with the elegiac Morricone cues and gradually building up to harder-edged and rockier cues and finally ending up with a pair of pure rock songs. While not sequenced chronologically, the collection also represents an interesting overview of how giallo film music has developed from orchestral-based melodic material of the 70s to heavily rock- and synth-influenced styles of the later 1980s. All the tracks are original soundtrack excerpts, and Cinecocktail 4 (especially coupled with the DVD documentary) provides an excellent overview of the unique music of this most Italian of horror subgenres.
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