DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 3, 2026

Alien from the Deep (1989) Do-gooder Jane and her cameraman are sent by Greenpeace to a tropical island where they hope to gather video evidence that the evil corporation E-Chem is illegally dumping radioactive waste into an active volcano. The cameraman is captured and tortured, but Jane escapes into the forest with the aid of a friendly snake venom farmer. As if Jane's situation wasn't complicated enough, a biomechanical alien—a 12-foot marionette with a ridiculously large crab claw—suddenly emerges from the nearby lake looking to munch on E-Chem's toxic sludge, and it will pinch anyone to death who gets in its way. The movie's burdened with an extremely padded runtime, even for an Antonio Margheriti flick, but the last 10 or 15 minutes are pretty fun if you stick around for them.

As the subtitle of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato si'—on care for our common home—suggests, the Church is all for environmental protection in the name of stewardship of the planet. However, the Church is not too fond of radical environmentalism when it prioritizes nature over human dignity, promotes anti-human or population-control ideas, or uses tactics that conflict with Catholic ethics. So, how does that apply to Jane's bosses, Greenpeace? Alas, one of the organization's co-founders, Patrick Moore, testified before Congress that he left the group because it shifted from protecting people and the environment to treating humans as the enemies of the Earth and a cancer on the planet. If true, that doesn't really sound like it keeps to the spirit of Laudato si'.

 

Night of the Big Heat (1967) It might be wintertime, but the small English island of Fara seems to be in the middle of an unexplainable heat wave. As if that weren't uncomfortable enough for local innkeeper and author Jeff, the new secretary he just hired sight-unseen turns out to be his former mistress Angela, the very woman he and his wife moved to Fara to escape. Amidst this domestic drama, the grueling temperature begins to drive everyone on the island nuts, especially once people begin turning up burned to death. As things reach a literal boiling point, a mysterious scientist shows up claiming the heat is a result of an ongoing alien invasion. There's nothing spectacular here, but if you're going to try and make a pseudo-Hammer film, then hiring Terence Fisher to direct and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to star is the way to do it.

 

Scorching heat appears as one of the final judgements of God in the 16th chapter of the book of Revelation where it states, "The fourth angel poured his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch men with fire; men were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory." Given the symbolic nature of the passage, the Church does not have an official single interpretation. Instead, rather than definitively say the verses depict some past or future event, many Catholic scholars focus on the themes of God’s definitive judgment on the unrepentant while assuring the faithful of ultimate victory in Christ.