Rest Stop: Don't Look Back

by Bear McCreary

Overview

John Shiban wrote and directed the 2006 straight-to-video low-budget slasher film Rest Stop (also known as Rest Stop: Dead Ahead), while Shawn Papazian served as producer. For its 2008 sequel, Rest Stop: Don't Look Back, Shiban again wrote the script, but he and Papazian switched director and producer duties. In both cases, however, Bear McCreary, most of whose credits come from cable television (e.g., the 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica), provided the music. In his liner notes, McCreary helpfully reveals that "The sound I was going for was 'Lynyrd Skynyrd Trapped in Hell.' I don't know if that's where I ended up," he adds, "but it was my starting point." Well, sort of. McCreary takes the film's Southern rural setting as a guide to coming up with music that often combines elements of classic rock, Southern style, with traditional country. The traditional country often seems to be played on instruments that the country musicians haven't bothered to tune lately, and that's deliberate, giving the music both a raucous and a bizarrely eerie feel appropriate to the theme of horror. The classic rock sections are less suggestive of Lynyrd Skynyrd than of the Band and the Eric Clapton of the early '70s, when he was palling around with members of Delaney & Bonnie's backup group prior to forming Derek & the Dominos. And then there is the song "Jesus, He Forgives You Too," performed by the Rev. Buford "Buck" Davis & His Minstrel Singers, a demented country gospel satire. The second half of the soundtrack, from the seventh track, "Creepy Gas Station," to the 14th, "The Driver Gets Marilyn," is more conventional horror movie scoring, full of ominous tones followed by furious action accompaniment. The last six tracks on the album actually are taken from the soundtrack to the first Rest Stop movie, making this a compendium of the music McCreary has provided so far to what must now be considered a movie series. ~ William Ruhlmann

Product Details

Release Date:	10/21/2008
Label:	La-La Land Records
UPC:	0826924107928
Rank:	144284

Tracks

1. Rattlesnake on the Highway
2. Roadside Assistance
3. Main Title
4. Tom and Marilyn
5. Cleansing the Sinner
6. Jesus, He Forgives You Too
7. Creepy Gas Station
8. Marilyn's Blues
9. On the Bus
10. Nicole's Ghost
11. Powertools
12. Tom to the Rescue
13. The Last Stand
14. The Driver Gets Marilyn
15. All That Remains
16. Lonely Woman
17. Trapped
18. Gravely Mistaken Identity
19. Nicole Fights Back
20. Down Home Salvation

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Bear McCreary   Primary Artist
Brendan McCreary   Primary Artist
Rev. Buford "Buck" And His Minstrel Singers Davis   Primary Artist
Raya Yarbrough   Primary Artist

Technical Credits

Bear McCreary   Composer,Audio Production,Score Producer,Liner Notes,Producer
Steve Kaplan   Engineer,Producer,Score Producer,Audio Production,Mixing
Raya Yarbrough   Performer
Brendan McCreary   Performer,Scoring Assistant
Jonathan Snipes   Sequencers
Matt Verboys   Audio Production,Executive Producer
Michael V. Gerhard   Audio Production
James Nelson   Editing,Mastering,Digital Editing
Michael Baber   Editing,Music Editor
Laurence Schwarz   Audio Engineer
Aaron A. Roethe   Scoring Coordinator
Paul E. Sobosky   Audio Engineer