Bear McCreary Getty Images for The Recording Academy Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment In May of 2024, I found myself backstage with a dozen of my favorite musicians, including Slash, at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, about to perform my debut rock concept album The Singularity for the first time. As the walls of the basement green room shuddered with the thunderous bass pulses of our opening act, Slash mentioned he'd recently returned from Vancouver, having visited the set of a film he was producing. "What's the film?" I asked casually, lacing up my sneakers. "We got the rights to remake this old movie from the '80s. Deathstalker." Related Stories TV Paramount+ U.K. Sets Season 2 of Eve Myles-Starring Drama 'The Crow Girl' Movies Slash on How Working at Tower Video in the '80s Led to Exec Producing Cult Movie Reboot 'Deathstalker' I froze. Vivid memories of countless nights spent watching bad cult movies with my childhood friends flooded my mind, accompanied by the energetic drum machine pulses and synthesizer melodies of famed B-movie composer Chuck Cirino's score for Deathstalker II. I spoke sooner than I could think. "Slash, we should make a theme song for your film using the original music from Deathstalker II!" Slash stared back at me with a look of surprise, then smiled. I developed a love for cult movies in high school. Growing up, my friends and I would trek to the local video store every Friday and walk out with armloads of VHS cassettes, and later DVDs. All a film needed to catch our eye was bold cover art, and an entertaining premise-the promise of ninety minutes of sheer joy. Some of the classic cult films were the first projects of filmmakers who would go on to become industry leaders: Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical, Joe Dante's Piranha, and its sequel, James Cameron's Piranha II: The Spawning and Danny Elman's first score, Forbidden Zone. But then there was the other stuff! Pure cult gold like Flash Gordon, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, Robot Jox, Highlander II: The Quickening, Fortress, Moron Movies, and anything put out by Troma, such as Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. The sword and sorcery genre was always reliable for delightful low-budget cheese, with entries such as The Beastmaster, The Barbarians, and of course, the Deathstalker series. (I continue to love cult films to this day: witness my recent appearance on Red Letter Media's cult film review show, Best of the Worst.) Bear McCreary in his dorm room. Courtesy Bear McCreary One balmy summer night in the Pacific Northwest, around the time I was nineteen years old, my friends and I rented all four Deathstalker films to marathon in one sitting. We were inspired by their outrageous VHS cover art that promised epic tales of heroic barbarians rescuing buxom babes from giant monsters. Like most low-budget productions of that era, the Deathstalker films failed to live up to the promise of their Frank Frazetta-inspired box-cover art. However, Deathstalker II stood out, with its joyously comedic, self-aware tone. The score to Deathstalker II, composed by Chuck Cirino, was so instantly catchy that I picked up a little Casio keyboard and began to play along as it recurred throughout the film. (Never before, or since, have I played along with a film's score during my first viewing!) Despite Chuck's score being performed entirely on synthesizers, I felt in it a yearning to be expressed by a live symphonic orchestra. When I went back to college in Los Angeles that fall, I produced my own orchestral arrangement of the theme, envisioning it as a huge cinematic spectacle. Given my technical limitations and lack of experience, my version ironically sounded even cheesier and more synth driven than Chuck's original. I burned a CD of the music and put it on my literal and metaphorical shelf of abandoned ideas. But, in my heart, I still wanted to hear it performed by a real orchestra! A few years later, when my first Battlestar Galactica soundtrack album was released, I was invited to take part in a composer signing at the iconic horror-themed bookstore Dark Delicacies. When I saw the guest list of nearly a dozen established industry veterans, one name stood out above the rest: Chuck Cirino. The synth-horn melody of Deathstalker II instantly blasted into my mind! A few days later, at the end of the afternoon, I sheepishly placed in Chuck's hands a CD of my version of his Deathstalker music. He was surprised, perhaps even confused, that this young composer was so familiar with his score! That afternoon, I was finally able to answer the question that had been gnawing at me for years: Who, exactly, is Chuck Cirino and how did he create such a memorable score for this l