DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 10, 2026

Urban Legend (1998) A young woman on her way back to college pulls into a gas station in the middle of nowhere, but quickly gets the creeps when the clerk tries to stop her from leaving. What she realizes too late is that the clerk has seen an axe murderer lying in the backseat of the car and is only trying to save her. Oops. And thus begins a series of killings based on old urban legends that will plague the students of Pendleton University as they try to navigate the soap opera that is their love lives. This is hardly the best of the Scream cash-ins made in the late '90s, but where else can you get kills centered around Pop Rocks and the Ohio Players' Love Rollercoaster? Of course, those set-pieces, along with everything else in the movie, are overshadowed by Rebecca Gayheart's out-of-control hairdo, which really should have gotten its own credit.

 

Some of the most fun parts in the stories about the Saints are, of course, the ones that probably never happened. You know, old urban legends like St. George's dragon, St, Christopher's dog head, the milk flowing out of St. Catherine of Alexandria's neck, St. Wilgefortis' miraculous lady beard, and so on. To trim down the crowded General Roman Calendar, those Saints whose exploits were mostly legendary were removed, but this doesn't mean they were un-canonized, or that their stories don't matter anymore. That's because even in Medieval hagiographies, such legends were never meant to be taken as a history text, and the Church never required a belief in them. Instead, even the most outlandish legends were intended to edify and inspire, and there's no reason they can't still do so. After all, sometimes it takes a legend to make a point a historian can't.

 

Lifeform (1996) One of NASA's Viking landers returns to Earth from Mars, which is odd considering it was never designed to do that. The craft is taken to a nearby aerospace research facility where scientists and the military argue over who has authority in this situation. The argument is settled for them, however, when something pops out of the lander and escapes into the facility's corridors. Likely having watched enough movies, the military locks everything down and prepares for a fight, but the expected bloodbath never comes. Instead, the armored alien seems more interested in peacefully hacking into the humans' computers, only taking a break to emerge from its exoskeleton to stare wistfully at the lead scientist. Unconvinced, the military guns the creature down anyway, which may be a mistake as the alien has also laid an egg, and what hatches from it has no intention of being as nice as its predecessor in obtaining their goal. This is a nice little DTV feature that turns the usual alien-movie playbook against the audience to keep the central mystery going.

 

It's always nice when a movie doesn't go the way you think it will, but it can de irritating when it happens in real life. Lots of Saints have warned against clinging to how we think things should go, expecting too much from ourselves or others, and then losing peace when reality doesn’t match the picture in our heads. St. Mary of the Cross MacKillop advises, "Never expect perfection, and bear quietly the defects that from time to time come under your notice… Pray to be ever ready for God’s will even when it takes you by surprise.” St. Catherine of Siena adds, “Everything that happens to us… can or will disturb us [only] if we do not hold these things in reverence, reflecting that they come from God.” St. Faustina concludes, “The past does not belong to me; the future is not mine; with all my soul I try to make use of the present moment.” In short, we should never stop wanting good things, but we should never let our expectations become idols. After all, it's God’s script, not ours.