DAILY CALL SHEET: APRIL 26, 2025

Invisible Ghost (1941) Bela Lugosi's wife abandons him, but shortly thereafter becomes brain damaged and starts showing up to stare vacantly through the windows. Whenever she does so, Bela slips into a trance and becomes a homicidal strangler. The thing is, he doesn't know he's doing it, and the number of people who might figure it out is slowly dwindling. Nobody's invisible and there is no ghost, but if you can live with the misleading title, this has a nice enough atmosphere to make it an easy way to fill an hour.

TIL: The movie may not have had an invisible ghost hanging around, but the world does. Pope Saint John Paul II spoke of the Holy Spirit as the “hidden God,” observable only through the effects of His actions in the world and the actions of those He resides within. Of course, just because He's invisible, that doesn't mean He's some impersonal force. The Holy Spirit is a person, meaning we have to develop a relationship with Him as we would anyone else. That can take time.

The Unholy (1988) After somehow miraculously surviving a fall from a skyscraper, Father Michael is sent to New Orleans to battle a demon who targets priests for temptation and murder. Following his acclaimed turn as a priest in The Assisi Underground, Ben Cross returns to the cassock in this lesser known (at least he probably hopes it is) late 80's horror outing. To be honest, the flick is on the mediocre side and the tempting more often than not involves little more than disrobed women. However, it does have plenty of rubber monster suit action, plus it's always nice to watch a film where the priest actually makes it to the finale with his vows intact and is portrayed as a hero for doing so.

TIL: Priestly celibacy (no marriage, therefore no sex) is not dogma, but rather a discipline imposed by the Latin Church after the turn of the first millennium when some priests started trying to leave Church property to their children. Celibacy has become to be viewed as a gift that God bestows on priests who, like the unmarried Jesus before them, can extend to all people the familial love usually reserved for spouses and children. So far, the discipline seems to have been a net positive for the Church. Naysayers have tried to link celibacy to sexual abuse; however, as celibate priests account for less than 1% of total child sexual abuse cases in most countries, that theory is patently stupid.