for nathaxnne walker

"The Devil is dope" - The Dramatics. Beyond the darkest depths of imagination, the outer rim of human experience, the forbidden rites thought forgotten, rediscovered. The annual tradition of the Halloween mix corrupted, made sinister, clawed loose from the crypt and into the stark sunlight of reality. Italian soundtracks to 1930's jazz to darkwave to stoner metal to house to folk to garage psychedelia and beyond. Remember: when you look Satan in the face, he looks back at you, with one eye open and one eye closed.

Whether it's a complicated layered confession from the man who introduced blockbuster filmmaking into the water supply, turning his fellow New Hollywood icons into endangered species or just the best monster movie of the 90s, Jurassic Park (1993) is a beloved institution that will never go away, that children around the world will never stop enjoying, that will never stop influencing the world of populist popcorn cinema.

The climax of the career of the greatest horror star of all time and also a miserable failure critically and commercially, The Devil Commands was the product of a hungry up and coming director, Edward Dmytryk, being paired with material best described as "Lovecraftian" decades before that word meant anything to anybody. In this episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast, host Patrick Ripoll tackles the second horror boom of the 40s and asks the big questions like: is that matte painting haunted?

The year was 2007, we were all drinking Four Loko, playing Super Mario Galaxy, listening to MIA's "Paper Planes" and taking to our Livejournals and message boards to argue about "torture porn" films. Were they pumped up cinema sadism designed to please craven adolescent creeps? Or angry political works calling back to horror's glory days of the 70's? The better question was, perhaps, were they torture porn at all? To answer all that and more on the latest episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast, Patrick recruited Gabe Powers of Genre Grinder to take a look at Hostel: Part Two (2007)

In a world full of rip-off artists the key is how you rip something off. Sean S. Cunningham, the director of two separate Bad News Bears knockoffs, was not the first guy to go "Hey, this Halloween movie is real popular and seems cheap to make" but he was the guy who did it the exact right way at the exact right time to change the world of horror forever. On the latest episode of Tracks of the Damned Patrick finally returns to the one that started it all (the uncut version!) and talks about why critics despised it, why it was so successful and just what kind of winding road one takes from pornography to deep sea sci-fi movies.

It's cold, meat is carved and you're thankful it exists. That's all the justification we need for a special Thanksgiving episode of Tracks of the Damned where Patrick & Jim sat down and did an impromptu, research-free commentary track for The Evil Dead. You may not get to be with your family this year but sit down next to the hearth (don't forget the screaming claymation Necronomicon) and warm your bones with us and Bruce Campbell. That ain't cranberry sauce! Ash gets the stuffing beaten out of him. And a third Thanksgiving joke.

We've cut off heads, double impaled lovers, went 3D, we ended things, we began them again, we went Frankenstein, we went Carrie, we went to Manhattan, we went to Hell, we went to Space we went Kaiju, what the hell is left to do?

You think this year was a clusterfuck, you ain't see nothing yet. Live, from the radio station of the third most prestigious community college in the greater Baton Rouge area, DJ Micah Bravo (Regina Linn) surveys a decimated post-nuclear landscape and does what they do every Halloween: get high and party with another great mix of weird and wild spooky tunes. The pumpkins may have mutated a new skin that's impervious to knives but Halloween will never die!

It took 17 years, three god-awful sequels, 18 spec scripts and meetings with every person who ever worked in Hollywood but we got here, we have arrived, grab your shit from the overhead bin because the plane has landed, Freddy Vs. Jason is upon us. A stupid idea inspired by only the most juvenile among the fanbases somehow, some way, turned out to be one of the best entries in either series, a well-crafted and energetic bit of party cinema, grab your gummi bears and throw them at the screen, shouting is enouraged! And in that spirit join Patrick as well as Genre Grinder's Gabe Powers for a rollicking good time commentary.

He went to development hell and stayed there but now Jason is escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism: SPAAAACE.

Yes, since "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman but slasher" was apparently too monumental a task for New Line to tackle Sean S. Cunningham once again delayed Freddy Vs. Jason to boldly go where Hellraiser, Leprechaun AND Critters had already gone before, none of them successfully. But would Jason X be the film to crack that "Horror Franchise In Space" nut?