I've been meaning to post about 7 BLACK NOTES, a great new obscure soundtrack blog, for the past few weeks. The recent post about Empire Films and the Pino Donaggio score for the Klaus Kinski film CRAWLSPACE seemed like the perfect reason.
In just a few short weeks of existence, 7 BLACK NOTES has featured everything from the amazing Rhino compilation of "hits" from the Golden Turkeys to the score from Antonio Margheriti's drive-in classic CANNIBAL APOCAYLPSE starring the great John Saxon.
For those of you unfamiliar with Empire Pictures, they're probably best known for Stuart Gordon's one-two Lovecraft double-shot of RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, but the Charles Band-helmed studio was like an 80s version of the old AIP Films. Friends and I would haunt the local bookstores each spring waiting for the festival issues of Variety to arrive so we could see what crazy films Empire had on the burner. Like AIP, many of the films promoted with full page ads were little more than ideas with poster art designed to attract investors looking to make a quick buck.
Of the films that did see the light of day there were underrated classics like ZONE TROOPERS and franchise-spawning hits like TRANCERS, unfairly written off as a TERMINATOR copy at the time of its theatrical release.
In addition to Donaggio's synth score for David Schmoeller's tale of a Nazi (Kinski, natch) who runs a boarding house, 7 BLACK NOTES features the score by Richard Band (Charlie's brother) for the drive-in weirdness of TROLL, one of the GREMLINS-inspired films of the era which I believe I saw at the Super 130 Drive-In in Edgewater Park, NJ.
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