DAILY CALL SHEET: MAY 27, 2024

The Alien Factor (1978) A craft of extraterrestrial origin carrying specimens for an intergalactic zoo crash lands on Earth, loosing three murderous mutants into the woods of Maryland. The monsters soon find a small town to terrorize and all seems lost, but thankfully doughy stranger Ben Zachary shows up to try and put things right. Like most of Don Dohler's low-budget regional efforts, this one has some dull spots and questionable acting, but this unapologetic love-letter to 50's sci-fi gets by on nifty creature designs and just plain old heart.

TIL: The Church has no official position on zoos per se, but writing for Catholic Answers, Prof. Paul Gondreau notes, "To inflict needless pain and torture on animals or to place them in inhumane living conditions is to engage in insensitive cruelty and to foster a kind of hardness of heart - which is very bad for our souls. It corrupts and perverts our moral character, and thereby disposes us to treat others with an adjacent hardness of heart or insensitive cruelty." Under this reasoning, zoos should take care to see their animals are well cared for and have humane habitats.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) In a setup that's like Goosebumps on steroids, space aliens resembling grotesque circus clowns descend upon a town and begin collecting the citizenry in order to turn them into cotton candy. Their weapons of choice include carnivorous popcorn ray guns, flesh dissolving ice cream, and a very lethal version of the old spring loaded boxing glove in a gift box gag. Uniquely surreal horror flick that guarantees good, clean PG-13 fun for everyone except maybe sufferers of coulrophobia.

TIL: Secretly baptized by Polycarp against the wishes of his Christian-killing father, St. Maturinus grew to be a performer of miracles, an expert at calming the over-excited, and a renowned exorcist. It's said he even drove a demon out of the stepdaughter of the Roman emperor Maximian. That this would lead St. Maturinus to being invoked against mental illness is no surprise. For some reason, though, he is also the patron Saint of clowns, which probably says more about clowns than it does the Saint himself.

DAILY CALL SHEET: MAY 14, 2025

The Lift (1983) A high-rise elevator with an experimental microprocessor loses its mechanical mind and starts offing anyone who, literally, pushes its buttons. Fortunately, Felix Adelaar, elevator repairman extraordinaire is on the case. You would think this would be as silly an idea as something like The Mangler's killer laundry machine or The Refrigerator's killer… well, you know, and yet it's got that little bit of something that's rightfully earned this obscure little Dutch horror a cult following over the years.

TIL: In noting in the Catechism that an object can be exorcised, the Church recognizes an object can become the focus of outside evil forces just as a person can. Now, that doesn’t mean your toaster is someday going to gain awareness and bite your hand off. It just means that, for whatever reason, the demonic can become fixated on a physical object. Such an idea should be no big shock to Christians who accept the notion that there’s a spiritual dimension to reality.

The Corpse Vanishes (1942) A somewhat mad scientist uses specially scented orchids to put virgin brides into death-like comas, then whisks their bodies back to his lab where he extracts gland fluid to keep his own wife young. A female journalist tracks the scientist down, but quickly runs into trouble when she discovers the deranged family who lives in the basement where the scientists dumps his victim's bodies. Except all those dead brides might not be so dead after all. Yep, it's another cheapie from Monogram starring Bela that doesn't make too much sense at all, but it only runs for one hour so you'll barely notice.

TIL: One of the odder reasons skeptics try to give for the reason Jesus' corpse vanished from the tomb is that he didn't really die on the cross, but rather swooned, was taken down, and healed with aloe and myrrh. Pesky science gets in the way of this conspiracy theory, though. A 1986 article published by medical experts in the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that the combination of extreme blood loss, shock, dehydration, soft tissue damage, extreme fatigue, nail wounds, pierced heart and lung, and general asphyxiation Jesus experienced would have left no room for survival. Points for trying, though.

DAILY CALL SHEET: MAY 4, 2025

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990) Hungry witch Debbie Harry prepares a young boy to be her supper, but agrees to postpone putting him in the oven for a while if the lad can pull a Scheherazade and keep her entertained with stories. The tales he spins include a Bram Stoker story in which Steve Buscemi meeting a mummy, a Stephen King yarn in which David Johansen battles the world's most indestructible cat, and a variation of Japanese folklore in which Rae Dawn Chong hides a secret about gargoyles. Simply put, if you liked Tales from the Darkside the TV show, you'll pretty much like this.

TIL: Speaking of source material, skeptics like to note some similarities in certain Bible stories such as the Great Flood and similar stories in earlier myths. The wishful thinking seems to be that the existence of these antecedents somehow disprove what's in Scripture. Another way to consider such parallels, though, is that maybe something like the flood actually happened way back when and various civilizations interpreted it through the lens of their individual cultures. The goal then becomes to figure out which of those versions best reflects spiritual and/or historical reality. The Bible tends to win such arguments.

For Aleteia this week I take a look at the new documentary on our soon-to-be Saint, ‘Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality’.