DAILY CALL SHEET: SEPTEMBER 6, 2026

Blue Velvet (1986) After running across a human ear in a field near his home, curiosity leads college student Jeffrey Beaumont to launch his own investigation into the matter. With the help of Sandy, the most innocent of girls next door, Jeffrey traces the ear to lounge singer Dorothy Vallens, whose family is being held hostage by vicious drug lord and Pabst Blue Ribbon fan Frank Booth. Though he knows he should report everything he's discovered to the police, Jeffrey instead finds himself seduced into a sadomasochistic relationship with Dorothy while simultaneously being drawn into his hometown's dark underbelly where Frank dwells. Can Jeffrey crawl his way back to the surface and salvage his burgeoning romance with Sandy, or is it too late to save his life and his very soul? Perhaps too seedy and brutal to recommend to everyone, Blue Velvet is still the film that cemented David Lynch as one of my all-time favorite filmmakers and left me determined to watch anything he made from that point on.

 

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest opening scenes in '80s cinema, the movie starts with the picturesque Americana of red roses, white picket fences, and blue skies, after which the camera slowly descends deep below the grass into a world teeming with squirming, crawling insects. As the Catechism notes, God made the world good, but original sin fractured its harmony, making visible creation alien and hostile to mankind, with both creation and man now bound hostage to decay. The world is still good because God made it that way, but it is wounded and fallen hostage to evil. And like Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, we must be on guard when we confront that evil, "for when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator." Fortunately, despite the underlying corruption, there's always hope as God will not let his work go, and the world is constantly being redeemed and healed.

 

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) Following the first movie's on-air killing of Dee Wallace as she transformed into a werewolf, Christopher Lee enlists her brother Big McLargeHuge to travel to Transylvania and confront the queen of werewolves, Stirba (Sybil Danning), who also happens to be Lee's sister. So, the movie should be called Howling II: Your Sisters are Werewolves. Of course, some video covers name it Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch, so best not to complain about what we've got. Anyway, Lee, Big, and a female journalist wander around the Balkans while werewolves from around the world gather at a nearby castle where Stirba holds court and shows off her massive… fangs. Hilariously awful, with slipshod werewolf makeup, completely out of place punk and new wave costumes, and one of the most notorious end credit sequences ever put to celluloid. Joe Dante, director of the original Howling, claims the first thing Christopher Lee did when he arrived on the set of Gremlins II was to apologize for appearing in this film.

 

With movies like The Castle of Fu Manchu and End of the World on his resume, Howling II is probably not the worst film Christopher Lee ever made, but it's nice he was willing to own up to his mistake anyway. Speaking to a general audience in 2022, Pope Francis recommended a daily examination of conscience as “an invitation to learn from our experiences” and “not to continue to repeat the same mistakes…  Before finishing the day, stop for a while. What happened? Not in the newspapers, not in life — what happened in my heart?” Not all mistakes are sins, of course. Mistakes made when we erroneously thought we were doi9ng the right thing, or just simple errors of fact or judgement, don't require confession. But even for honest mistakes, the Church still suggests we examine our conscience daily precisely so that we notice patterns in thought and behavior, take responsibility for them, and stop repeating the same faults.