Daveigh Chase

It's been seven years since the events involving Samantha Darko (Daveigh Chase, reprising her role from the original film) and her family, including big brother Donnie, played out. Now 18, she decides to join her best friend Corey (Briana Evigan) on a road trip to California. There, Sam hopes to become a professional dancer. Unfortunately, their car breaks down outside a one-horse town in the middle of Utah. While they wait for replacement parts, the girls meet up with local rebel Randy (Ed Westwick), crazed preacher John Mellit (Matthew Davis), and equally fanatical parishioner Trudy Potter (Elizabeth Berkley). When a meteor hits the tiny burg late one night, it sets into motion a chain of events that has Samantha having horrific visions of the end of the world. It's a fate she shares with a Gulf War veteran (James Lafferty) who is convinced that Armageddon will occur on July 4, 1995.

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Lilo & Stitch tells the story of two outcasts searching for a place to fit in. Lilo is a young Hawaiian girl who is shunned by her friends because she picks fights and plays unfairly. Her older sister, Nani, is raising her because their parents died in a car crash. The social worker assigned to their case has threatened to remove Lilo from Nani's care because she cannot control Lilo's poor behavior. It sounds like the prototypical dysfunctional American family - how un-Disney-like!

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Spirited Away begins with the young Chihiro reluctantly accompanying her family as they explore a deserted amusement park. The girl's parents are seduced by a feast set up in one of the park's food stands and eventually turn into pigs. At sunset Chihiro is transported into an alternate phantom universe filled with lumbering radish men, the shrill and controlling witch Yubaba (voiced by Suzanne Pleshette in her finest performance since Oh God, Book II), and a trio of bouncing, disembodied heads. Looking for a way to free her parents and find a way home keeps Chihiro exploring this world long enough to uncover enough strange and amazing creatures to keep us glued to the screen for the duration.

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Abandoning the gimmicky defining premise of itspredecessor, about the ghost of an evil littlegirl exacting blood-curdling vengeance on anyone who watched a hauntedvideo tape, "The Ring Two" seems also to have jettisoned allnotions of pacing, creative chills and common sense.

Catching up with newspaper reporter NaomiWatts (whose talents are wasted on B-movie screams)and her hollow-eyed son (David Dorfman) after they've survived the firstfilm by slipping through a gaping hole in its own internal logic, "TheRing Two" gives its poltergeist arbitrary new powers to track thesetwo down to a small West Coast town and possess the boy's body.

Little else happens in the course of the story, exceptthat Watts' suspicious attempts at exorcism draw the attention of the localChild Protective Services. The kid ends up in the hospital (from whichhe easily escapes and no search is ever mounted) while Watts tracks downthe ghostly girl's asylum-confined birth mother (Sissy Spacek) for somelong-winded exposition laying out the new rules of the plot.

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