DAILY CALL SHEET: APRIL 20, 2025

Gamera vs. Barugon (1966) When a ginormous opal turns out to be an egg (when will people in movies learn giant oval things are always an egg), it hatches the monstrous Barugon. This doesn't sit well with Gamera, who returns from space to save the world. But can even the terrific terrapin survive Barugon's phallic ice-spray tongue or the even more destructive rainbow death ray that shoots out of Barugon's back? Yes, rainbow death ray. Look, it's a Gamera movie. If you can't go along with a rainbow death ray, you shouldn't even be here.

TIL: Most everyone knows the story of God putting a rainbow in the sky as a promise to Noah that He wouldn't destroy the world anymore until it's absolutely the right time. However, they usually forget it shows up again in John's vision of Heaven in Revelation where the apostle sees a rainbow encircling the throne of God. It's a call back to the lid (named the mercy seat) which covered the Ark of the Covenant, and it symbolizes that even at the end of all things, God is encompassed with mercy.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) Still recovering from the mental and physical wounds suffered during the first movie, Dr. Frankenstein wants nothing to do with  the flamboyant Dr. Pretorius' plans to create a mate for the quite alive but horribly lonely creature. However, after Pretorius convinces the mopey monster to kidnap Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth, the sullen scientist reluctantly agrees to the experiment. The rest is true celluloid history. From Karloff's sympathetic performance to Whales' subversive humor, just about everything works here, even the Bride's signature fright-wig hairdo. Likely to forever have a spot on the list of greatest sequels ever made.

TIL: To modern audiences, it's pretty obvious the super-gay Pretorius wants to conceive with Frankenstein without any of that messy female stuff mucking up the process. Now, the Church does not condemn all uses of technology to help with conception. However, it does conclude that any method that doesn't involve sex between the husband and the wife is immoral because it does violence to the dignity of the human person and the institution of marriage. As Pope Pius XII put it, "To reduce the common life of a husband and wife and the conjugal act to a mere organic function for the transmission of seed would be but to convert the domestic hearth, the family sanctuary, into a biological laboratory."