DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 25, 2025

Maximum Overdrive (1986) After Earth passes through the tail of a rogue comet, everything mechanical on the planet comes to life with a singular purpose… kill all humans. Eventually, a small group of survivors hold up in a diner where they are besieged by an army of vehicles demanding that their gas tanks be kept full. The people soon realize they must escape to a technology-free island or spend the rest of their lives as slaves to the machines. Poorly directed by Stephen King, excellently scored by AC/DC, and memorable mostly for a truck with the Green Goblin's head on it, this is notoriously bad and simultaneously beloved. In short, it's from the 80's.

TIL: As it turns out in the movie, the machines aren't actually alive, but the idea still raises questions about whether they ever could be. Dr. Mariele Courtois of Benedictine College says no. When asked what is it that makes human beings different from machines, she answered, "An interior life… the idea and awareness of the personal destiny that God awakens in the individual when he creates a unique person. Machines using artificial intelligence can’t have an interior personal life where they are able to offer themselves as self-gift.” Or put another way, machines have no soul, and therefore can never be truly alive.

The Gumball Rally (1976) Upon hearing the word "gumball" declared, adventurous drivers from all around the country drop whatever they're doing and assemble in their fastest vehicles to participate in a totally illegal, rules be damned, coast-to-coast race across the United States. It sounds crazy so, naturally, Gary Busey shows up. One of the first of many films based on the real life Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, this is neither the funniest nor the most memorable of the batch, but Raúl Juliá and some cool 70's rides make it worth the while.

TIL: On March 9th of each year, drivers from all over The Eternal City assemble at the Basilica di Santa Francesca Romana to honor the woman to whom the church is dedicated, St. Frances of Rome, the patron Saint of all those who pilot vehicles. Born in 1384, she would go on to found the Olivetan Oblates of Mary, an order still in existence today. What St. Frances is most known for, though, is the visions she had of a guardian angel who would light her way so she could travel safely. That was sufficient for Pope Pius XI, the first pope to travel by car, to declare her the patron of drivers.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 21, 2025

UHF (1989) Shiftless goofball George is put in charge of a failing UHF channel (look it up youngsters) which his uncle won in a poker game. However, George's new job looks to be short lived until he and Station 62's janitor Stanley Spadowski go for broke and flood the airwaves with off kilter shows like Wheel of Fish and The Flying Pope. Unfortunately, crosstown rivals Channel 8 aren't happy about Channel 62's sudden rise to the top of the ratings chart and plot to destroy them. This sadly bombed at the box-office because the geniuses at Orion inexplicably thought a small Weird Al comedy was the right movie to release against Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, and Batman. Those that did go to see it, though, became lifelong fans and to this day demand others watch it, as they should. 

TIL: At the peak of his television career, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen was drawing about 10 million viewers a week, a feat which earned him an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality in 1953. Now that he's on the road to beatification, you think his achievements would make him a shoe-in for patron Saint of television. The thing is, somebody else already has that title. In 1958, Pope Pius XII declared Saint Clare of Assisi the patroness of television despite the fact that she was born centuries before the boob tube was invented. His reasoning? Once, when Saint Clare became too sick to go to church, it's said the Holy Spirit projected real-time images of the Mass on her bedroom wall. Basically, she was the first person to get to watch TV in bed.

Evil of Dracula (1974) A new psychology professor arrives at a girls-only boarding school only to discover lots of pale women walking the halls at night, a coffin in the basement, and strange puncture marks on the breasts of a number of students. It doesn't take a math teacher to see this adds up to vampires. The third time is not quite the charm in this final entry in Toho's Bloodthirsty trilogy, but even though it's the lesser of the three films, it's still a kick watching the studio that brought us Godzilla produce a Japanese take on the tried and true Hammer horror formula. It's also kind of ironic they copy the English style so well considering one of the underlying themes of the Bloodthirsty trilogy is that these kind of vampires wouldn't even be a problem in Japan if stupid westerners hadn't brought them into the country to begin with.

TIL: The Japanese love/hate relationship with western culture goes all the way back to the 16th Century when the Portuguese first blundered into the country, eventually bringing the Jesuits along with them. The Japanese were actually pretty accepting of Christianity at first, but the misguided attempts at evangelism on the part of some missionaries combined with native Shogun isolationism eventually resulted in Christianity being outlawed until the late 1800's. That hasn't stopped Christianity from slowly permeating the culture, though. These days, 60 - 70% of all weddings in Japan are Christian-style, and the celebration of Christian related holidays like Christmas and Valentine's Day are on the rise. Of course, the Japanese currently have little interest in the doctrine behind such celebrations, but given a few more centuries, that's likely to change as well.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 17, 2025

 

Yellow Submarine (1968) The vile Blue Meanies launch an attack on Pepperland to put an end to all displays of color and music. Fortunately, Admiral Fred manages to escape in the titular vehicle which he uses to recruit help in the form of The Beatles. To get back to Pepperland, Fred and the Fab Four must traverse a number of weird interdimensional waterways, including the Sea of Nothing where they pick up a morose magical being known as Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D. Their forces assembled, our heroes launch a final musical battle against the Meanies. For fans of The Beatles, the 60's aesthetic, or Peter Max's psychedelic artwork, this is a must. Others may leave slightly befuddled.

TIL: The Beatles claimed all you need is love, but what kind, storge, philia, eros, or agape? Storge (familial love), philia (friendship), and eros (passion and desire) are nice, but don't seem to be sufficient to need anything else. That leaves agape , which the Modern Catholic Dictionary defines as "the most distinctively Christian form of love. Used by Christ to describe the love among the persons of the Trinity, it is also the love he commanded his followers to have for one another (John 13:34-35). It is totally selfless love, which seeks not one's own advantage but only to benefit or share with another." Yeah, that sounds like the one.

Still Voices - Yellow Submarine (1968) "Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them." - Samuel Johnson

DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 8, 2025

A Dark Song (2016) Unable to get over the death of her seven-year old son, Sophia comes up with a desperate plan. She persuades Joseph, a dubious practitioner of magic, to move into a rental home with her and engage in a grueling months-long ritual designed to manifest her guardian angel, who in turn will allow her to communicate with the spirit of her son. The catch is that the rite eventually requires a ceremony of forgiveness which Sophia will have nothing to do with. As a result, things go horribly, horribly wrong. This dark and brutal tale of grief definitely falls into the category of "not for most people", but if it clicks with you, it will click hard.

TIL: The ritual in A Dark Song is actually derived from a real life Kabbalistic novel called The Book of Abramelin written sometime around the year 1400. Kabbalah at its most benevolent is an esoteric way of thought formulated primarily by 12th and 13th century Jewish mystics which focuses on pondering God's creation of the world, and at its worst is a gateway to Occultism.  From a Christian standpoint, the more benevolent path of Kabbalah leads to errors about the nature of God (e.g. Lurianic Kabbalah suggests evil originates from God), errors which can endanger the soul. The worst path, the one that has stuff like trying to usurp God's will through conjurations and such, leads straight to Hell.

The Cat from Outer Space (1978) When his downed spacecraft is seized by the military, a feline-like alien named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 (or Jake to his friends) enlists the aid of an Earth scientist to help get it back. Lots of family friendly hijinks ensue as Jake and his pals outwit the government and a cadre of corporate criminals who want Jake's powers for their own purposes. Likely released to cash-in on the booming UFO craze in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this perfectly pleasant live-action Disney fare is probably a tad bit too long, but nostalgia and the simple fact that it stars a cool cat keeps me from ragging on it too much.

TIL: The Church has no official position on aliens other than their existence would have zero effect on her teachings. However, if there were an extraterrestrial rational species (ETRS) with rational souls and free will (basically made in the image of God like us), Notre Dame's Christopher Baglow has some thoughts. He speculates that under the principle of particularity (the divine tendency to deal with a particular people first rather the entirety of humanity), it's hypothetically possible an ETRS might experience an Incarnation of God particular to their own unique physicality. In short, if Jake was real, his planet might have experienced a cat version of Jesus. Yeah, probably not, but it's a fun thought exercise.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 28, 2025

 

Time Barbarians (1990) In an age long past, super-buff King Doran gives a magic amulet to his wife for protection, so naturally she's murdered by his worst enemy Mandrak almost immediately. Using the amulet, Mandrak escapes to L.A. circa 1990, but Doran finds a way to follow. There, Doran meets his wife's future doppelganger and the two team up to take down the bad guy. I'm pretty sure the word 'inane' was invented for movies just like this. It's hard to name a favorite facepalm moment, but the one in which a guy looks at his obviously dead friend lying on the floor with a bullet hole in his head and asks, "Are you okay?" is a strong contender.

TIL: Most of the time the word barbarian comes up in the New Testament, it's simply referring to non-Greeks. It turns out those with a Grecian education like St. Paul and St. Luke had a hard time understanding the rougher sounding language of some foreign peoples and so referred to them as "bárbaros", or babblers. Not very scary. However, in the letter to the Colossians, he does also apply the word to the Scythians. With their generally uncouth and savage behavior, these guys were more along the lines of what we think of when we use the word barbarian these days and nobody liked them. Even so, Paul makes a point that Christ came for the barbarians as well.

Beginning of the End (1957) Scientist Peter Graves leads the battle against giant grasshoppers, which is fitting since it's partially his fault there are freaking giant grasshoppers to begin with. It's impossible to review this Bert I. Gordon riff on Them! without mentioning that the "special" effects consist of real grasshoppers crawling across blown up photographs of buildings. Then again, why wouldn't you mention it since the movie's cheesiness is part of its charm.

TIL: Lots of dieticians point out that the Kashrut in Leviticus had health benefits over and above the religious and tribal reasons for its list of culinary do's and don'ts. For instance, grasshoppers, which were approved for eating, are about 40% protein, 43% fat, and 13% fiber. Basically, they're good for you. But, healthy or not, being allowed and being required are not the same thing, so you'll be hard pressed to find the little buggers on too many kosher menus these days.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 22, 2025

 

The Food of the Gods (1976) On a remote island, farmers feed their chickens some mysterious stuff which bubbles up from the ground, because why wouldn't you, and they start to grow enormous. So do the bugs, bees, and rats who get into the food as well. Soon, the whole island is in danger of being overrun by the big beasties who've gotten a taste for more meaty meals. While there's only a little bit of H. G. Wells to be found in this adaptation of his novel, there's a whole lot of Bert I. Gordon, and that brings with it all the good and bad you would expect.

TIL: In ancient Greek mythology, the food of the gods was called ambrosia and it is said to be the stuff that granted them their immortality. For the Jews and Christians, of course, God is conceived of as an unchangeable, immaterial spirit, meaning he has no body and therefore needs no food. As Irenaeus explained, “Far removed is the Father of all from those things which operate among men, the affections and passions. He is simple, not composed of parts, without structure, altogether like and equal to himself alone. He is all mind, all spirit, all thought, all intelligence, all reason.”

Final Exam (1981) After a couple is butchered at the local lover's lane, students at Lanier College spend the last day of exams talking about it. They also pull some pranks, cheat on tests, question their relationships, consider the future, read some books, try to make a drug deal, eat lunch... Eventually the killer gets bored with lurking in the bushes watching all of this and pops out to massacre the majority of the cast in the last 15 minutes. You would think a slasher film which bends over backward to flesh out its characters would be a welcome change of pace, but if you think that then you've never watched Final Exam. The movie spends over an hour of its brisk 89 minutes letting you get to know the characters, and yet by the end we still just get the jock, the geek, the slut, the stoner, etc., the same tired stereotypes that have shown up in countless slashers. And yet I still really enjoy Final Exam because something's wrong with me I guess. Sigh.

TIL: As the Catechism notes, “Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of Heaven– through purification or immediately, – or immediate and everlasting damnation.” There's a second judgement coming at the end of time, though, a sort of final exam for all of creation where those still living will get their failing or passing grade, those still in detention in Purgatory get to graduate to Heaven, and the earthly campus of the old world will be shut down for good to make way for something new. Since everyone is destined to face one or the other of these exams, best to do the homework assignments beforehand so you're prepared for either.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 6, 2025

 

Eight Legged Freaks (2002) Crickets contaminated with toxic waste are fed to the various arachnids residing at an exotic spider farm, causing them to grow to the size of a mini-van. At first the freaks are content to hang out in the closed mines beneath a small Arizona town, but soon the temptation to catch a bite at the local mall becomes too strong to resist. Lots of familiar faces like David Arquette and teeny-bopper Scarlett Johansson never take any of the sketchy early 2000's CGI seriously and neither should audiences. For lighthearted fun only.

TIL: Some Ukrainians put spider web ornaments on their Christmas trees in honor of an legend about a poor widow and her children who had no money to decorate the tree which had grown in the middle of their cabin. However, while the family slept on Christmas Eve, a spider covered the tree with webs. As the sun rose on Christmas morning, the Child Jesus appeared and turned the silken threads into gold and silver, providing the family with beautiful decorations and a ticket out of poverty. Some claim this story is where the custom of putting tinsel on Christmas trees comes from.

Now Showing at a Blog Near You: For Aleteia this week I take a look at the latest exorcism film ‘The Ritual’. Al Pacino as a priest? I guess he's doing penance for playing the devil that time.