Tales From The Score Keeper: Death Race 2000 and more

What’d you expect, another pretty face? Nope, nothing but cult classic soundtracks this time around.

A quartet of new releases from Dragon’s Domain Records proves that there’s no flick so obscure that it doesn’t merit a soundtrack release. One of those four new releases, though, has probably been on collectors’ wish lists for quite a while.

The fourth volume of Dragon’s Domain’s ongoing compilation of film and TV scores by Paul Chihara – a very busy composer in the 1970s, but a very underrepresented composer on CD shelves – has music from three of Chihara’s scores. Crackers and Forever, Lulu were both 1980s films scored by Chihara, but the real draw here may be the handful of selections (seven tracks for a movie that didn’t have a lot of music to begin with) of newly re-recorded score from 1975’s cult classic Death Race 2000. (Though older than the other two films represented, Death Race 2000 is still the best known and dominates the packaging.) While the Death Race tracks are new recordings from Chihara’s original music, the selections from Crackers and Forever, Lulu are the original recordings. Only 500 copies of the CD will be pressed, with 50 of those autographed by the composer; as with most other Dragon’s Domain CD releases, there’s instant access to a digital copy of the album as well.

Getting a similar CD-plus-digital treatment is William Stromberg’s score from the Creepshow-style 2018 horror/comedy anthology movie Tales Of Frankenstein, a film written and directed by Donald F. Glut (of The Empire Strikes Back novelization fame). As each of the movie’s four stories take place in different times and places, Stromberg effectively wrote four wildly different mini-scores, all of them gathered on a CD which is, again, limited to a pressing of 500 copies, 50 of them signed by Stromberg.

Another of Dragon’s Domain new releases – again limited to a pressing of 500 copies on CD – hails from Full Moon Pictures’ resident composer, Richard Band, presenting his music from the 2019 horror film Exorcism At 60,000 Feet, a movie which counted Bai Ling and Lance Henriksen among its cast. Exorcism At 60,000 Feet is also available in digital form only.

Another CD collects the scores from two Australian-made sci-fi cult classics of the 1980s, Incident At Raven’s Gate (scored by Graham Tardif) and Allan Zavod’s score from The Time Guardian. (Obscure as it may be, 1987’s Time Guardian boasted Dean Stockwell and Carrie Fisher among its cast members.) Again, this release is limted to 500 copies on CD.

La-La Land Records has no new releases this week, however they have sounded the “low stock” red alert for their definitive 3-CD complete score reissue of Jerry Goldsmith’s all-time classic score from 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Fewer than 300 copies remain of this magnificent collection, which not only gathers, at long last, every note of Goldsmith’s score as heard in the film, but includes early out-takes from Goldsmith’s earliest attempts to find the movie’s musical voice, as well as fun bonus tracks like David Cassidy’s vocal rendition of Ilia’s theme (!), Bob James’ jazz cover of the movie’s main theme, and – my personal favorite – isolated tracks of the Blaster Beam doing its otherworldly, Lovecraftian-sounding thing. Beam this one up before it finally goes out of print.