idely lauded as a solid piece of "zombie attack" filmmaking, suffused with robust if gory humor, some great stunts and excellent zombie FX, Undead is the feature debut of Australia's talented Spierig brothers, Michael and Peter. They hired Cliff Bradley, who had worked on several other projects with them since their high-school days, to score. It was all done on Bradley's home computer, with a few real instruments, such as electric guitar, harp, violin, trumpet and a choir (recorded in Bradley's mother's office, where the best acoustics on a no-money budget were to be had) here and there. The score is nevertheless very thematic, based as it is on five main themes.
Things get off to a great lurching start with "Prologue—March of the Undead." In the CD's accompanying booklet, Bradley says that this was "definitely the hardest theme to write." Perhaps, but he's acquitted himself marvelously, positioning his synthesizer patches against percussion comprised of cowbells and chimes. "March" is followed by a really charming little "small-town panorama" type theme, "Berkeley." Third on the theme hit parade is "Rene's Theme," also cue three on the disc. This is actually the "Berkeley" theme, twisted a bit and moved into a minor key. It's used as the basis for most of the action music in the film.
The guitar-based "Marion's Theme" follows, a nice little blues riff set against ominous strings and what sounds like someone tapping on a metal stair rail or perhaps a telephone pole guy wire. It seems a perfectly appropriate theme for Marion, who's an obvious loon.
"The Acid Rain" is the fifth main theme, starting off pretty quietly but developing throughout the film. It's the most meditative of the lot, at least during its first appearance in cue 7.
Clever—and composed at home
As may be supposed, this isn't the usual sort of brooding, atmospheric horror film soundtrack. On the contrary, the music here is clever and quirky, but Bradley has the good sense to play it as straight as he can against the film's blood-spattered humor. If his work were as loopy as the film itself, the whole thing would come crashing down. Consider the example of The Who, in their early days. John Entwistle adopted a motionless onstage stance in contrast to the wild playing of Keith Moon and Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey's microphone-swinging. Like Entwistle, Bradley's score provides the stability this comedy/horror film needs.
Everything else here works well to the total effect. The one exception is the final cut, "Little Green Men," a rock song performed by the unfortunately named Buttkrak. It's an AC/DC type of thing that is played on the radio in one scene. It doesn't really belong on the disc, but take a look at the CD's length—it needed some padding. Without this 4:18 tune the disc wouldn't have "cracked" 50 minutes.
The CD packaging is decent, with some good notes provided by Bradley and a page by the Spierig brothers about working with him. All the extra musicians receive credit, which is always a nice thing to see. Even the sample libraries are identified. All in all, an excellent effort. Kudos once more to La La Land for a job well done.
Here's an interesting bit of trivia about the film—over 600 liters of fake plasma were used during filming. Wonder if there's a credit for "Blood Wrangler?"
— Al
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