Lexx: Series 3, Vols. 1 & 2 (1999)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Chris Bould & Bill Fleming
Written by Paul Donovan & Lex Gigeroff
Starring Brian Downey, Xenia Seeberg, Michael McManus, Tom Gallant, Jeffrey Hirschfield

Features:

• Behind-the-scenes “making of” segment
  
• Interview with film editor Stewart Dowds
  
• Storyboards
  
• Production sketches
  
• Interactive trivia
  

Anamorphic: N/A, appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent It...or just catch the reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel.

When we join this story (in its third season), the Lexx, an organic insect/spaceship, has been floating randomly in space for about four thousand years with its crew in a state of cryostasis. The crew of the Lexx (voiced by Gallant) consists of Captain Stanley Tweedle (Downey), the half-reptile Xev (Seeberg), the undead Kai (McManus), and 790, a robot head (voiced by Hirschfield). The Lexx finds itself in orbit between two warring planets: Fire and Water. Fire is a desert planet that has no water, and (you probably guessed it) Water is a liquid planet that has no land. Since the Lexx is an organic machine, it must eat organic food to continue functioning. Needless to say, after nearly 4000 years, it’s a little hungry. A small group of people, lead by Prince (Nigel Bennett), flies up to the Lexx thinking it’s a comet and somehow get onboard. The plot line for the entire third series consists of the crew of the Lexx getting involved in this war between these two planets, trying to find food for themselves and the Lexx, and being able to get back on their way.

The best way to describeLexx is that it's a kind of Star Trek meets softcore porn. It seems that everyone on the crew (with the exception of Kai since he’s dead…more on that later) is obsessed with sex. Not only that, but every aspect of the show revolves around that. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not being a stick in the mud or an uberprude. In fact, that’s most of the problem. The crew is obsessed with sex, but none of them seem to be getting any. AND, there is a man and a woman on the crew that could be doing it all the time, but they insist that they must venture from planet to planet looking for sex and food. It just seems that there is so much more that they are missing by focusing on that one thing so much. Most of the setup for the plot just doesn’t make any sense. Those are the most obvious problems.

On a different note, they really don’t make it very easy on someone jumping in to the middle of the series at all. This comes from someone who is. There’s no “here’s how we got to where we are” exposition that would have hopefully made everything make a little more sense. There are only little hints of what has gone on in the past interspersed throughout Season 3 to let a newbie know what is going on.

Further, the characters are not all that well written. Let me start with Kai. I get the idea that Michael McManus is a better actor than this role allows him to show. I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow his character has become undead. He can’t be killed, yet he somehow must be placed in cryostasis like the other crew members. I couldn’t fully figure that out from the show, but a trip to the Sci-Fi Channel's website helped me out. Why that information wasn't on the discs is a mystery to me. Stanley is supposed to be the everyman character, but he is also the captain of the Lexx. Don’t for a second think of Captain Kirk, the man who can turn any bad situation into a winning situation (or at least into a situation involving green women). No, Stanley is a bumbling idiot of a guy who doesn’t have much of a spine at all. Xev is a voluptuous vixen of a character who, for all I can tell, is supposed to walk around in every shot wearing almost nothing just to be seen. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but she didn’t really lend all that much to the story at all. However, on a more positive note, most of the special effects are pretty imaginative and fairly well executed.

As for the DVD: it's just as disappointing. The “making-of” segments last about five minutes each. Ten minutes across two whole discs of shows. Perhaps the best piece of bonus material are the character bios which do give you at least some little bit of insight to the backstory, but even they are just reading plain text off the screen--and you can see what they omitted from my paragraph above. The actor bios were kind of surprising in that most of the actors have very strong backgrounds and some fairly impressive training credits. The interview with the editor is, on the whole, very boring and I was thankful that it only lasted five minutes. This man seems to be personality-deficient, and I think my time would have been better spent watching my fingernails grow.

To sum, unless you are a very hardcore sci-fi fan (or obviously a fan of the show), I would recommend that you skip these DVDs and just hope to catch the reruns on the SciFi Channel.