S. Darko

Richard Kelly's original Donnie Darko was an instant cult classic: a smart, mind-boggling time travel tale unlike anything told before. Kelly has publicly disavowed any connection to S. Darko, the straight-to-DVD sequel that attempts to pick up the Darko family's story seven years after the original, and though there are brief moments of hope that this film will capture a hint of the original's creativity the end result is a train wreck of bad dialogue, mediocre acting, nonsensical storytelling and cute girls. The year is 1995 and little Samantha Darko has grown into an unstable young woman after the trauma of losing her brother Donnie. Sam and her friend Corey are travelling across America on a drug-fuelled road trip when their engine blows in a small desert town. Strange things begin to take place as the tangent universe begins to unfold to reveal a future that may come to pass. All the hallmarks of the original film are present in S. Darko, but without the subtle intelligence of Richard Kelly's creation. Instead, we get a confusing muddle of illogical, disconnected time travel incidents that make little or no sense, remaining frustratingly unresolved by the end of the film. Extras include the standard assortment of commentaries, making-of features and deleted scenes that fail to fill in the many gaps in the film's plot. Fans will be entirely disappointed by S. Darko and should avoid this film at all costs, unless they have the power to follow their fluid light tube back in time to erase the memory of having witnessed this terrible event. It might actually be less painful to have a mysterious airplane engine kill you in your sleep.