Tracks Of The Damned

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 shooting your costume dramas in England, and what Vincent Price means to Patrick as a queer man and more. What better way to celebrate the fact that at any moment any of us can be destroyed by billionaires than to watch Vincent Price as a tyrannical prince get himself, and all his rich friends, infected with a flesh-eating plague? 

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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 no one 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 take a look at the 1973 cult classic Messiah of Evil and ask the really hard questions like: Did Dario Argento see this or what? Were Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck fans of Antonioni or what? Are these some incredible murals or what? In the commentary they answer (or at least ask) all that about the definitive California horror film of the 20th century.

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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 Director's Club, where he did all kinds of wacky bonus episodes. One such episode back in 2013 was, in fact, the first audio commentary he ever did: Friday the 13th (1980) with a special guest, his mother. A 50-something year old Catholic woman with no concept of horror films, she was nonetheless an eager student as Patrick used the seminal 80's horror film as a lesson in the techniques and history of the slasher genre. He also decided to see how long it would take her to recognize Kevin Bacon, and the answer was: quite a while.

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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 documentary from Australia. In this episode Patrick looks at the detail-driven film and all the smart choices director Joel Anderson makes to really convince the viewer that what they're looking at really happened.

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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 Patrick takes on Oculus (2013) and talks about the exciting career of Mike Flanagan, the value of the "editing brain", and the proper way to throttle a child actor.

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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 before Bela Lugosi donned his cape and a fall that began long before Abbot and Costello met anybody. Also track the winding road of Universal's oft-forgotten Mummy series, from an eerie Dracula rip-off in Egypt to a shambling monster strangling Creole people in Louisiana!

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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 classic Fright Night (1985)! 

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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 director Fred F. Sears' saving Columbia Pictures thousands of dollars by blanketing a movie with narration instead of paying actors to speak!

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