Tracks Of The Damned

Did you know the original Halloween is 110 minutes long? I'm sorry, but who's got time for that noise? Maybe back in 1978 when all people had to do was homebrew beer and collect Susan B. Anthony dollars and wait in line for gas that shit would fly, but us modern folks got things to do, places to be, Pokemon to Go.   What the world needs now, is films, short films.   And we here at Tracks of the Da...

Ho boy. Ok folks, this one is a little different. Patrick took a five day trip to Salem, Massachusetts with his partner Tessa Racked to visit their friends: actress Jess Conger-Henry and theater programmer Nick Henry . He fully intended to spend all five days steeping in the rich history of Salem to return with a 4 hour lecture on witchcraft, witch hunts, the effects of historical tourism on moder...

You ever see something so ugly it's cute again, like an armadillo or a pangolin? Not to oversell it, but this movie is kind of like that. It has the color of reality, just muted, twisted, slightly broken. Alive but not. That's right: two-strip technicolor is the synthetic flesh of color processes.   On the latest episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast, Patrick di...

Sure, Night of the Living Dead is the masterpiece, the one they all fawn over.. But you know what else it is? Wasteful. Did it shock the world, invent a lasting pop cultural icon, and inspire hundreds of low-budget copycats the world over? Certainly. But it also cost 90,000 dollars. Which means, if I do my math correctly (and what is art if not the result of math), George Romero could have taken t...

Satan. Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying. The debauchery of the 60's had yet to even really begin when Roger Corman decided to have the final word in colorful horror bachanalia with The Masque of the Red Death (1963). In this episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror commentary track podcast, Patrick dives into the Corman Poe cycle, the advantages of...

Patrick's waiting at the edge of the city. He's peering around buildings at night, and he's waiting. Waiting for you! And, with his dear friend Bill Ackerman of the Supporting Characters podcast , he'll take you one by one and noone will hear you scream. Noone will hear you SCREAM!   With joy at this latest episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast! In it, the two t...

Hey folks, I'm Jim, the owner of the Now Playing Network. Patrick is on vacation in Mexico, looking for a nice seaside town to flee to if Trump becomes president, but that's no reason for the show not to go on! So instead of a proper episode of Tracks of the Damned this week, he's sent us this #ThrowbackThursday blast from the past. A white back Patrick was my co-host on our film podcast called Di...

Some ghosts are so effective they don't even need to show up to haunt someone. Is this the case for the Palmers (Twin Peaks reference intentional), a family dealing with their daughter's tragic drowning in some questionable ways? Or is there actually a restless spirit in their house? This is the central question proposed in Lake Mungo (2008), an underrated masterpiece of a fictional horror documen...

Downer ending? Check. Domestic abuse? Check. Child abuse? You know it. Parricide AND sororicide? Undeniably. There's no getting around it, for a movie about a piece of furniture that eats dogs, this is pretty grim. It's also fairly sui generis, a modern horror masterpiece which finds a truly captivating lagrange point between A Woman Under the Influence, Cloud Atlas and The Shining. This week Patr...

Lon Chaney Jr. may have had to hide bottles of vodka in his bandages to get through some of those later sequels, but this is a fast and breezy episode you'll be able to blaze through with no trouble, as we take on the hour-long Universal B-horror flick The Mummy's Tomb (1942) !  In this episode Patrick charts the rise and fall of Universal's classic monster movies, with a rise that began long befo...

Welcome back to another episode of Tracks of the Damned where Patrick asks an important question: If a sexually frustrated teenage girl wants to run away with her geeky boyfriend's hunky next door neighbor, is it really so wrong just because he's a bloodthirsty vampire? This is the sort of adolescent philosophical discourse you get into when you watch Tom Holland's Rear Window meets Dracula classi...

Welcome to the very first episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast! Your host Patrick Ripoll opens this venture somewhat inauspiciously with a track for the cult giant monster movie classic The Giant Claw (1957)! Hear as Patrick explains the giant monster movie craze! Witness what a couple hundred dollars and a Mexican puppet factory can accomplish! Marvel at direc...