Search - Rick Wakeman :: Crime of Passion - O.S.T.

Nasty piece of work!

Henry R. Kujawa | "The Forbidden Zone" (Camden, NJ) | 05/01/2001

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Rick Wakeman seems like he might be an ideal composer for movie scores. Why then, I wonder, are so many of the films he has done music for either extremely obscure, off the beaten path, or just plain weird? CRIMES OF PASSION (1984) certainly fits the film-- a sordid, nasty tale in which a disturbed woman works out her demons by posing as a high-class call girl-- and winds up meeting both a man whose marriage is on the rocks, AND an even more disturbed character posing as a street preacher! As with most of his films (including LISZTOMANIA) Ken Russell tends to go too far over the edge of bad taste and lunacy. In this case, the end result is a truly heart-rending story of lust, depravity, love & redemption-- but to get there you have to wade through some really disturbing stuff (especially if you see the "unrated" version!). Wakeman's score ranges from the sadly beautiful (including "Web Of Love" which features an excerpt of Dvorak's "Going Home") to the in-your-face nasty ("It's A Lovely Life", an ironic main title for such a UGLY song, with vocals by Maggie Bell). As on THE BURNING, there are spots where Rick seems to be on auto-- I'd swear he's simply lifting certain passages from earlier, and better, of his own albums. Both the film and the soundtrack are hard on your nerves-- but on its own, the film works, while I rank this album near the bottom of Rick's output."