The straight-to-video sequel to Donnie Darko, called S. Darko, has finally arrived in stores. It's the story of Donnie's little sister Samantha - she of "sparkle motion" - and is mostly a rehash of the first flick with some Jesus and bad dates thrown in.

S. Darko is directed by Chris Fisher, whose main claim to fame is directing one episode of Chuck. It's nowhere near as spooky and cool as the first film, and in many ways is a bad retelling of Donnie Darko except with a female protagonist on a road trip whose evil bunny (yes the evil bunny comes back) is a Gulf War veteran. She's also menaced by some churchy types, and there are a few clumsy efforts to show us that Christianity is bad - or maybe just a few Christians are bad, or maybe they're just weird.

Hard to say, when the plot is mostly focused on showing us Samantha looking hot in teeny shorts or dresses. There's time travel, of course, and those blobby Abyss-looking things pop out of people's chests just like in the first movie. But it all feels very rote until this scene, which you can see here, when the world starts to end and Samantha happens to be on a really awful date. There's a fun originality to this scene, where her date's flailing efforts at making out are nearly as scary (if not scarier) than the "tesseract" and a mysterious bombardment from space.

If you loved the original Darko flick, I hesitate to recommend this sequel. Check it out for completism, but don't expect it to take you to strange new places the way the first movie did.

S. Darko via IMDB

Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at .