DAILY CALL SHEET: FEBRUARY 9, 2025

Midnight Offerings (1981) Were you a fan of the old M-TV show Celebrity Deathmatch but were disappointed they never did a Waltons vs. Little House on the Prairie episode? Not to worry, ABC's Movie of the Week has you covered. It's Erin Walton vs. Mary Ingalls as two teen witches dueling to the death (eventually) for the affection of their high school's resident heartthrob. Sure it's silly, but played so dead serious you can't help but just go with it. Who knew such family friendly femmes could be so fatal?

TIL: Making offerings to deities is an ancient cross-cultural thing. However, according to Genesis, the origin of the practice goes back to humanity's beginning with Cain‘s gift of the fruits of the earth to Jehovah. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes, "at the root of all oblations is the idea that God has a claim upon man, his possessions, and the fruits of his labors, and is pleased at receiving an acknowledgment of His sovereignty." That notion remains as part of the small offerings we make these days like fasting, tithing, or charitable actions.

The Monster Walks (1932) An heiress and her fiancé arrive at her ancestral estate only to find (1) everybody there hates her guts because the family's patriarch left her all the money, and (2) her dearly departed dad was conducting weird experiments in the basement. All of that can mean only one thing. You guessed it, there's a homicidal ape loose in the house. Look, I don't know where all these rich people in the 30's and 40's got their apes, but if the glut of old dark house movies from that time period are any indication, every mansion came with at last one. Anyway, this is a lesser effort in the ape in an old dark house subgenre, but if will do if you've already seen the better ones.

TIL: Apes have no religion, but Jane Goodall often wondered if they had some kind of inner life, especially after watching them seemingly contemplate nature with what seemed to be awe and wonder. “Why wouldn’t they also have feelings of some kind of spirituality?” she asked. Alas, Michael Egnor at Mind Matters notes that every study conducted so far indicates, "Apes can’t contemplate spirituality-God, the afterlife, morality, salvation-because they can’t contemplate anything... Abstraction is beyond the reach of animal minds, because abstraction is an immaterial power of the mind, and only humans have immaterial thoughts." That's a shame, because I really wanted to use potential ape spirituality to make a joke about the I'm spiritual but not religious crowd.