David Straiton Movies

10-year-old Nick (Jascha Washington) is suffering from an infection which may prevent him from donating bone marrow to his 8-year-old leukemia-victim brother Matty (Dabir Snell). House (Hugh Laurie) must diagnose and cure the infection before it is too late--for both boys. Elsewhere, although Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) is gone from House's home, his troublesome dog Hector remains behind, eager and willing to chew up every bit of furniture in the place. And still not fully recovered from his grevious error in the previous episode "House Training", Foreman (Omar Epps) makes a crucial decision. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After failing to inoculate Connor (Vincent Kartheiser) against the profane influence of Jasmine (Gina Torres), Angel (David Boreanaz) beats the boy senseless and stages a daring escape from the hotel. Fred (Amy Acker) feels just sick about leaving Connor and the comatose Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) behind, but Angel advises her and the others to deaden their hearts if they want to survive. Taking to the sewers, the fang gang soon encounter a group of feral teen demon-hunters. Skulking underground ever since The Beast extinguished the sun (see "Long Day's Journey"), the kids have escaped Jasmine's influence, but are being picked off slowly by an unseen creature. Wesley (Alexis Denisof) soon encounters the skittery, spider-like creature (Jeff Ricketts) and learns that it's part of an ancient, otherdimensional demon race who have worshipped Jasmine for millennia. Held prisoner as the demon performs a blood ritual in Jasmine's honor, Wes ferrets out some intriguing information about the sinister higher being. Meanwhile, Jasmine herself continues "eating" her followers, including Cordelia -- or so it seems. Connor isn't too happy about this turn of events, but Jasmine uses it to draw him even closer. She also manages to seize control of one of the sewer-dwelling teens, who leads Connor and an army of followers straight to Angel, who is in the process of rescuing Wes from the spider-demon. Surrounded and outnumbered, the gang steel themselves for one last stand -- until Wes opens a portal to the spider-demon's home dimension. Determined that at least one person survive to fight Jasmine another day, Angel crosses through -- and into a hellish landscape full of countless additional skittering demons. Originally broadcast April 23, 2003, on the WB network, "Sacrifice" marked season four, episode 20 of the supernatural soap opera. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

"Earth can be darker than space," so read the tagline for the ambitious cable sci-fi/fantasy series Odyssey 5. Returning from a lengthy mission in deep space, the crew of a shuttle discovered that they cannot go home because there is no home to go to: The Earth had been destroyed by a huge explosion. A mysterious alien called "the Seeker" (played in the two-hour pilot episode by John Neville) offered the crew an opportunity to prevent the catastrophe and save humankind by traveling five years back in time. There was only one hitch: The crew members were not their "present" selves in the past, but had all grown five years younger, and were still mired in the personal problems that plagued them at this earlier stage: One of the crewpersons was stuck in an unhappy marriage, another was weighed down by a drug dependency, still another was a pimply faced, neurotic high school kid, and so on. The principal characters were the Taggarts -- Chuck (Peter Weller), Neil (Christopher Gorham), Paige (Gina Clayton), and Marc (Kenneth Mitchell) -- and Kurt Mendel (Sebastian Roche), Angela Perry (Tamara Craig Thomas), and Sarah Forbes (Leslie Silva). Odyssey 5 launched its 19-episode Showtime cable network run on June 21, 2002. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When a rich software mogul (David Herman) hires Angel (David Boreanaz) to find out who's blackmailing him with pictures of his visit to a demon brothel, Angel's investigation takes him to the vampire-infested inner city. There, he comes into contact with a group of homeless vampire hunters who refuse to believe that a creature like Angel could be anything but evil. He escapes their clutches only by momentarily kidnapping Alonna (Michelle Kelly), the sister of the hunters' leader, Charles Gunn (J. August Richards). When war erupts between the hunters and a particularly nasty vampire nest, Alonna is turned into a vampire -- and she almost turns her brother, too. Angel, Wesley (Alexis Denisof), and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) help defeat the vampires, but Gunn and his gang remain squatting in their digs, vowing to continue their fight. Originally broadcast May 9, 2000, on the WB network, "War Zone" marked season one, episode 20 of the supernatural comedy drama. This episode includes the first appearance of J. August Richards as Gunn, who would become a regular character in season two. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Virtually every "alien at large" movie ever filmed is referenced in the made-for-TV shocker Survivor, which nonetheless manages to sustain audience attention with a few adroit cliché reversals. It seems that, billions of years ago, a race of extraterrestrials bred pre-evolutionary human beings for organ-harvesting purposes. Unfortunately, the alien ship bearing these primitive humans crashed on contact with the earth, and has remained frozen in the Arctic wastes ever since. Flash-forward to the present: Oil driller Adam King (Greg Evigan) and his team, cut off from civilization, inadvertently revive the sole survivor of the long-ago crash. Turns out that this creature is very, very hungry after his long sleep--and he has a distinct preference for the taste of human flesh! Originally aired as part of UPN's "Nightworld" movie series, Survivor made its American TV bow on May 13, 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

One of the most successful Canadian drama series of the late 1990s, Da Vinci's Inquest was also one of the CBC's slickest efforts -- not to mention one of the most realistic. Nicholas Campbell starred as Dominic Da Vinci, a former cop who worked as a police coroner in Vancouver. Like Quincy before him, Da Vinci used his official capacity to right wrongs, help those in distress, and in general boldly go where the "regular" cops feared to tread. In this he was assisted by a number of friends, business associates, and family members, who frequently found themselves in jeopardy, obligating the hero to effect a last-minute escape. Compared by some critics to the American TVer Homicide (albeit with a bit more melodrama), the series was created by Chris Haddock, who also wrote many of the 60-minute teleplays. Da Vinci's Inquest began its long and profitable CBC TV run on October 7, 1998. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide