DAILY CALL SHEET: NOVEMBER 10, 2026

Doom (2005) Scientists at an underground facility in Nevada discover a long-buried wormhole to Mars and use it to set up labs on the red planet. Twenty years later, the researchers go incommunicado and the marines, led by The Rock, are sent in to find out what went wrong. What they find are throngs of hideous mutants created by injecting Martian chromosomes into human subjects, because why wouldn't you do that? When some of the monsters make their way through the wormhole back to Earth, the decision is made to destroy everything and everyone. It turns out, though, that the Martian DNA only turns crappy people into mutants. For good guys, it just makes them tougher. It's up to one souped-up super solider to take down every monster in the facility before his superiors nuke the place just to be sure. About the only thing the movie gets right is the brief first-person perspective sequence that duplicates the player experience from the video game. If you can find that scene on YouTube, feel free to skip the rest.

 

One of the things the movie gets dismally wrong is substituting the video game's literal demons from Hell with generic human monsters, thereby taking away one of the things that makes Doom unique amongst its gaming peers. No doubt, part of the reason they did so was the movie's budget, or lack thereof. But it's possible another reason was a lot of people these days don't like to talk about Hell, not even preachers. A Pew Research analysis of thousands of sermons found phrases like “eternal hell” rare, even among evangelicals who used to be all about fire and brimstone. This caused St. Pope John Paul II to lament in 1994 that preachers, catechists, and teachers “too often… no longer have the courage to preach the threat of hell.” That's a shame, because as he explained, "The thought of hell — and even less the improper use of biblical images — must not create anxiety or despair, but is a necessary and healthy reminder of freedom within the proclamation that the risen Jesus has conquered Satan, giving us the Spirit of God who makes us cry Abba, Father!”

  

Old Dracula (1974) David Niven plays the legendary Count, who has been around so long he can't easily get out to find victims anymore. Instead, he sits around reading Playboy (for the pictures of exposed… veins) while opening his famous Transylvanian castle to tourists. Not only does this keep Dracula fed, but it provides the blood samples he needs to develop a serum which will revive his wife Vampira. The right blood types finally arrive with a bus load of vacationing Playmates, but one of the models is a person of color, which somehow alters the formula's chemistry. So, once the transfusion is completed, instead of getting back the wife he knew, Dracula instead gets Christie Love. And if you're old enough to get that joke, you might also be old enough to enjoy the geriatric race-based humor on display in this breezy British horror comedy. If nothing else, this will make you wish the aforementioned Ms. Love, Teresa Graves, had shown up in more stuff.

 

The Church teaches that all human beings share the same nature, are created in the image of God, and possess equal dignity. For that reason, the Church has always considered  differences of race, ethnicity, or nationality irrelevant to the validity or liceity of a marriage. In fact, the Church has a history of opposing laws that forbid interracial marriage. In 1948, a Catholic couple challenged California's ban on interracial marriage, leading to the first state-level invalidation of an anti-miscegenation law. In 1963, The National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice called for repeal of all similar remaining state laws. In 1967, this would lead to numerous Catholic-written Amicus briefs being filed in the case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court ultimately declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. So, no problem at all in the Church with marriage between races. Now, marriage between those of different faiths, that's another discussion.