It's hard enough for a score composer tasked with writing music for a genre film to come up with something both original and appropriate to the stylistic confines of the movie formula. But when a composer is brought in to work on a parody of a genre film, asserting any individuality must be even harder. And then there's the question, should the composer just stick to the clichés, or make the music funny, too?
Christopher Lennertz seems to have intended to have it both ways in his music for the satire Vampires Suck, a send-up of the Twilight series, saying in a sleeve note that he wanted to take all the typical musical characteristics of a vampire movie "and turn it up to eleven," but also that the music was supposed to "play the straight man against the comedy." As it turns out, this hedge is a good description of what he achieved. It is true that, when he's writing the many climaxes that pepper the score (such as those heard in the cues "Edward Saves Becca" and "The Pack Arrives"), he goes over the top, to the point that the music is too melodramatic to be taken seriously. Similarly, the goth rock of "Meet the Sullens," complete with Amy White providing wordless wailing in the manner of Amy Lee of
Evanescence, seems like a joke version of such music as heard in other scores. But much of the time,
Lennertz does play the straight man, which means that he writes clichéd music that could just as easily be in one of the Twilight movies as in a parody of them. ~ William Ruhlmann