DAILY CALL SHEET: JULY 8, 2025

A Dark Song (2016) Unable to get over the death of her seven-year old son, Sophia comes up with a desperate plan. She persuades Joseph, a dubious practitioner of magic, to move into a rental home with her and engage in a grueling months-long ritual designed to manifest her guardian angel, who in turn will allow her to communicate with the spirit of her son. The catch is that the rite eventually requires a ceremony of forgiveness which Sophia will have nothing to do with. As a result, things go horribly, horribly wrong. This dark and brutal tale of grief definitely falls into the category of "not for most people", but if it clicks with you, it will click hard.

TIL: The ritual in A Dark Song is actually derived from a real life Kabbalistic novel called The Book of Abramelin written sometime around the year 1400. Kabbalah at its most benevolent is an esoteric way of thought formulated primarily by 12th and 13th century Jewish mystics which focuses on pondering God's creation of the world, and at its worst is a gateway to Occultism.  From a Christian standpoint, the more benevolent path of Kabbalah leads to errors about the nature of God (e.g. Lurianic Kabbalah suggests evil originates from God), errors which can endanger the soul. The worst path, the one that has stuff like trying to usurp God's will through conjurations and such, leads straight to Hell.

The Cat from Outer Space (1978) When his downed spacecraft is seized by the military, a feline-like alien named Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 (or Jake to his friends) enlists the aid of an Earth scientist to help get it back. Lots of family friendly hijinks ensue as Jake and his pals outwit the government and a cadre of corporate criminals who want Jake's powers for their own purposes. Likely released to cash-in on the booming UFO craze in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this perfectly pleasant live-action Disney fare is probably a tad bit too long, but nostalgia and the simple fact that it stars a cool cat keeps me from ragging on it too much.

TIL: The Church has no official position on aliens other than their existence would have zero effect on her teachings. However, if there were an extraterrestrial rational species (ETRS) with rational souls and free will (basically made in the image of God like us), Notre Dame's Christopher Baglow has some thoughts. He speculates that under the principle of particularity (the divine tendency to deal with a particular people first rather the entirety of humanity), it's hypothetically possible an ETRS might experience an Incarnation of God particular to their own unique physicality. In short, if Jake was real, his planet might have experienced a cat version of Jesus. Yeah, probably not, but it's a fun thought exercise.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 28, 2025

 

Time Barbarians (1990) In an age long past, super-buff King Doran gives a magic amulet to his wife for protection, so naturally she's murdered by his worst enemy Mandrak almost immediately. Using the amulet, Mandrak escapes to L.A. circa 1990, but Doran finds a way to follow. There, Doran meets his wife's future doppelganger and the two team up to take down the bad guy. I'm pretty sure the word 'inane' was invented for movies just like this. It's hard to name a favorite facepalm moment, but the one in which a guy looks at his obviously dead friend lying on the floor with a bullet hole in his head and asks, "Are you okay?" is a strong contender.

TIL: Most of the time the word barbarian comes up in the New Testament, it's simply referring to non-Greeks. It turns out those with a Grecian education like St. Paul and St. Luke had a hard time understanding the rougher sounding language of some foreign peoples and so referred to them as "bárbaros", or babblers. Not very scary. However, in the letter to the Colossians, he does also apply the word to the Scythians. With their generally uncouth and savage behavior, these guys were more along the lines of what we think of when we use the word barbarian these days and nobody liked them. Even so, Paul makes a point that Christ came for the barbarians as well.

Beginning of the End (1957) Scientist Peter Graves leads the battle against giant grasshoppers, which is fitting since it's partially his fault there are freaking giant grasshoppers to begin with. It's impossible to review this Bert I. Gordon riff on Them! without mentioning that the "special" effects consist of real grasshoppers crawling across blown up photographs of buildings. Then again, why wouldn't you mention it since the movie's cheesiness is part of its charm.

TIL: Lots of dieticians point out that the Kashrut in Leviticus had health benefits over and above the religious and tribal reasons for its list of culinary do's and don'ts. For instance, grasshoppers, which were approved for eating, are about 40% protein, 43% fat, and 13% fiber. Basically, they're good for you. But, healthy or not, being allowed and being required are not the same thing, so you'll be hard pressed to find the little buggers on too many kosher menus these days.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 22, 2025

 

The Food of the Gods (1976) On a remote island, farmers feed their chickens some mysterious stuff which bubbles up from the ground, because why wouldn't you, and they start to grow enormous. So do the bugs, bees, and rats who get into the food as well. Soon, the whole island is in danger of being overrun by the big beasties who've gotten a taste for more meaty meals. While there's only a little bit of H. G. Wells to be found in this adaptation of his novel, there's a whole lot of Bert I. Gordon, and that brings with it all the good and bad you would expect.

TIL: In ancient Greek mythology, the food of the gods was called ambrosia and it is said to be the stuff that granted them their immortality. For the Jews and Christians, of course, God is conceived of as an unchangeable, immaterial spirit, meaning he has no body and therefore needs no food. As Irenaeus explained, “Far removed is the Father of all from those things which operate among men, the affections and passions. He is simple, not composed of parts, without structure, altogether like and equal to himself alone. He is all mind, all spirit, all thought, all intelligence, all reason.”

Final Exam (1981) After a couple is butchered at the local lover's lane, students at Lanier College spend the last day of exams talking about it. They also pull some pranks, cheat on tests, question their relationships, consider the future, read some books, try to make a drug deal, eat lunch... Eventually the killer gets bored with lurking in the bushes watching all of this and pops out to massacre the majority of the cast in the last 15 minutes. You would think a slasher film which bends over backward to flesh out its characters would be a welcome change of pace, but if you think that then you've never watched Final Exam. The movie spends over an hour of its brisk 89 minutes letting you get to know the characters, and yet by the end we still just get the jock, the geek, the slut, the stoner, etc., the same tired stereotypes that have shown up in countless slashers. And yet I still really enjoy Final Exam because something's wrong with me I guess. Sigh.

TIL: As the Catechism notes, “Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of Heaven– through purification or immediately, – or immediate and everlasting damnation.” There's a second judgement coming at the end of time, though, a sort of final exam for all of creation where those still living will get their failing or passing grade, those still in detention in Purgatory get to graduate to Heaven, and the earthly campus of the old world will be shut down for good to make way for something new. Since everyone is destined to face one or the other of these exams, best to do the homework assignments beforehand so you're prepared for either.

DAILY CALL SHEET: JUNE 6, 2025

 

Eight Legged Freaks (2002) Crickets contaminated with toxic waste are fed to the various arachnids residing at an exotic spider farm, causing them to grow to the size of a mini-van. At first the freaks are content to hang out in the closed mines beneath a small Arizona town, but soon the temptation to catch a bite at the local mall becomes too strong to resist. Lots of familiar faces like David Arquette and teeny-bopper Scarlett Johansson never take any of the sketchy early 2000's CGI seriously and neither should audiences. For lighthearted fun only.

TIL: Some Ukrainians put spider web ornaments on their Christmas trees in honor of an legend about a poor widow and her children who had no money to decorate the tree which had grown in the middle of their cabin. However, while the family slept on Christmas Eve, a spider covered the tree with webs. As the sun rose on Christmas morning, the Child Jesus appeared and turned the silken threads into gold and silver, providing the family with beautiful decorations and a ticket out of poverty. Some claim this story is where the custom of putting tinsel on Christmas trees comes from.

Now Showing at a Blog Near You: For Aleteia this week I take a look at the latest exorcism film ‘The Ritual’. Al Pacino as a priest? I guess he's doing penance for playing the devil that time.

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’.