DAILY CALL SHEET: OCTOBER 31,K 2026

Forever Evil (1987) It's not the best vacation Marc Denning has ever had. Not only does something (emphasis on the thing) kill his pregnant girlfriend, his brother, and all their cabinmates, but when Marc tries to escape, he is struck by a car. Once he gets out of the hospital, Marc teams up with Reggie, the only survivor of a similar massacre, to find out who or what is responsible. Their excruciatingly slow investigation eventually leads them into conflict with Parker Nash, a shady real estate agent and follower of Yog-Kothag, an ancient dark god who was so vile the other not-so dark gods ganged up on him and locked him up in a quasar. Can Marc and Reggie stop Nash from freeing Yog-Kothag, or is the universe already doomed? The film reportedly cost $150,000 to make, most of which probably went to its three relatively decent special effects. Still, this attempt to combine Evil Dead with a little bit of Lovecraft could have been fine despite its miniscule budget if only the filmmakers had trimmed about 20 minutes or so out of its middle.

 

If the movies are to be believed, there's some demon or other ancient evil spirit lurking around every corner waiting to mangle and abuse us. Now, the Church teaches uncategorically that demonic entities are real and active in our world, but it's important to note that it does not treat them as the default explanation for everything that goes bad. Rather, Catholic theology usually sees the cause of most concrete evils (illness, accidents, economic loss, natural disasters, etc.) not as demonic attacks, but rather ordinary things such as some disorder in nature, natural sickness, death (obviously), or just the plain old human tendency to sin. Demons are after us all the time, but for the most part their primary weapon is temptation. After we give in to that, they can sit back and let us do all the harm ourselves.

 

 

Commando (1985) Someone is offing all the members of ex-special forces colonel John Matrix's old unit, apparently saving him for last. Matrix is finally attacked at home, but the mercenaries' real target turns out to be his young daughter Jenny, whom they kidnap. The bad guys plan is to use the girl to blackmail Matrix into carrying out a political assassination for them, and Matrix agrees, or so the mercenaries think. Knowing the mercenaries will just kill Jenny anyway, Matrix enlists the unwilling help of a stewardess to make it look like he's going through with the job, but he's really killing his way towards the men holding his child. That's all there is to the story, but any more would just get in the way of all the fisticuffs, explosions, and Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. You know, the stuff you actually watch Commando to see. In the kingdom of '80s action movies, Commando sits on the throne.

 

According to the Church, protecting the body, mind, faith, and morals of your children to the best of your ability is a grave, God-given duty. The Catechism puts it this way: the fruitfulness of marriage is not only procreation but moral education and spiritual formation, and the right and the duty of parents to educate their children are primordial and inalienable. That parental duty includes providing, as far as they can, for both physical and spiritual needs, with the protection of the child's soul treated as especially weighty. And yes, in Catholic moral teaching, force, even the lethal kind, can be lawful, and sometimes a grave duty, when it is the only realistic way to stop an unjust attack on your children. So a parent who strikes, restrains, or in a true last resort kills an attacker to save a child from serious harm is not, on Catholic grounds, guilty of murder.