Best known for her dramatic, often sentimental romance movie scores,
Rachel Portman deviates 180 degrees off course with 1994's willfully absurd
The Road to Wellville, an effort as eccentric, ambitious, and deeply flawed as the screen comedy it accompanies. Like director Alan Parker's narrative, set in the Battle Creek Sanitarium founded by health pioneer and breakfast cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg,
Portman's score is obsessed with the weaknesses and quirks of the human body. Flatulent tubas bloat at seemingly every turn, kazoos squawk like so much new age babble, and mechanical rhythms accelerate like hearts racing after hours in the gym. As one might expect, a little of this goes a long way, and Varèse Sarabande further compounds the problem by cutting and pasting dialogue from the film. Removed from their proper cinematic context, lines like "An erection is a flagpole on your grave" and "I was not masturbating...I was massaging my colon!" are even more awkward than they appear in print. ~ Jason Ankeny