Secret Gem Of A Score?

[Vaderbait1 1]

So I'm watching this movie called The Haunted Palace, starring Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, Jr. It's a Roger Corman film and I've never heard of it or seen it before. It's really good....like....really good. But what surprises me even mroe than the good acting, good dialogue, tight pacing and script, and eerie atmosphere is the musical score. This movie had to have been made on the cheap, but the score is majestic, brooding, and downright evil sounding.

Has anyone heard it? According to a Google search, Ronald Stein composed it.

[Maglorfin 219]

He did and the soundtrack came out in 2000, as you can see here, but I guess it's been sold out for quite some time now, especially if this is true: "Marked as "Limited edition of 3000 copies", however, only 1000 copies pressed."

[Omen II 1,300]

Ronald Stein wrote some fine scores for some pretty hokey movies, including Attack of the Crab Monsters, and scored several of Roger Corman's pictures. I have a lot of respect for composers such as him who never had the resources that his contemporaries at the bigger studios enjoyed, yet turned out some terrific scores nonetheless. I found a nice quote from Stein about his score for that very movie:

"I usually go to the theater to see the films that I've scored just to see if what I've accomplished came out the way it should be for the effect on the audience. The first night 'The Haunted Palace' came out, I went to a small theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and I was sitting toward the back, and in front of me was sitting a little girl and what looked like her parents on either side. And I don't know if there was too much theme, but about the last time Vincent Price walks down the hall and while he was doing that the theme came in again ... to me, like a classic Frankenstein type of romantic theme, with Tchaikovskian overtones ... and there's no dialogue, and it's about the third time you've heard that theme, and the little girl said out loud, "Oh, that music!" Well, that made my evening because she meant it in a kind of excruciatingly electrifying or exotic way."

[Ollie 1,375]

Are any of you aware of this set?

http://www.percepto.com/projects/022/