'Avoriaz Terror' (Theme from Jess Franco’s ‘Shining Sex’) - Daniel J. White
'‘Alpha…. Alpha is her name. The woman who has drained me of my will power….’'
In the first act of Jesús Franco’s ‘Shining Sex, La Fille au Sexe Brilliant’, we see the bubbly showgirl Cynthia (Lina Romay) invited back to the high-rise apartment of the elegant lady, ‘Alpha’ (Evelyn Scott). Initially it seems to be Cynthia who takes charge in the bedroom, while her hostess is pushed around like a rag-doll, but after a deadly ointment is applied to her nether parts, the roles are rapidly reversed and ‘Alpha’ soon lives up to her name. She is not simply a rich pervert, but an alien being from another dimension, on an important mission to ‘seek information’ and intends to used Cynthia as her human assassin.
After a full body inspection she orders her other human slave, ‘Andros’ (Ramon Ardid), to viciously assault Cynthia - in the French version of the film, this scene is accompanied only by the heavy winds outside, (which also blow the long white curtains into shot), while the English version is scored with Daniel J. White’s next original theme. The music is just as sinister as the visuals, and the quiet chromatic sequences played by the Fender Rhodes Piano in the opening bars soon lead into large whole-tone chords from the ARP String Ensemble. Underneath this, the bass line moves in tritone steps and the music of hell becomes loud and clear. While elsewhere in the score the whole-tone scale is used to evoke the mystery of the unknown, here the horror is truly upon us and there is no escape.
The music passes through all manner of dissonances but ultimately it finishes clearly and triumphantly on a chord of Bb major, (just as Cynthia’s suffering eventually leads to a cry of pleasure.)
Later in the story she is temporarily rescued by Dr. Seward (Jesús Franco) only to then be drawn back to the Alpha's den again via alien telepathy. With the curtains all drawn, the holiday apartment has now become a torture chamber, and as Cythnia is tied down with duct tape and flogged this music theme returns.
In 1984, White renamed the track ‘Avoriaz Terror (Electronic Et Percussions)’, and included it on the radio and television album, ‘Mood Selection Ambiance Volume 2’ (Corelia - CC 384467.) This disc also included tracks from other earlier scores, such as Franco’s ‘Female Vampire’, ‘Tender Et Pervers Emanuelle’ and ‘Je Brûle De Partout’, presumably to try and garner more profit than the films themselves ever would. Indeed, Franco himself would regularly source cues from these very discs right up until his final films.
‘Avoriaz Terror’ made its final outing in Franco’s hard-core oddity of 1987, ‘Phalo Crest’. In one of the darkest sequences he ever shot, the jack-booted Prison Governess (Carmen Carrión) instructs two mentally retarded thugs to assault her high-profile prisoner, ‘Julia Channing’. In exchange for this ordeal she will be granted parole to attend a dinner party at her mother’s orange plantation, ‘Phalo Crest’, (Franco was not so much parodying the then popular American soap-opera, ‘Falcon Crest’, as violently raping it on Spanish soil.) As for White’s music, not content with sullying its association with the on-screen carnage thus far, Franco then goes even further when an old friend of the Channing family, ‘Professor Spencer’, stages an ‘’ass-fucking contest at Sacramento’’ to verify the aphrodisiacal properties of their wine, (distilled from oranges, with some bodily fluids thrown in.) Once again, ‘Avoriaz Terror’ does the dubious honours on the soundtrack….
I am just an amateur and do not own any of this.