Lexx (1997)
Today, for the heck of it, I rewatched the pilot movie of Lexx, a Canadian-German cable sci-fi show from the late '90s/early 00s that I distinctly remember as one of the most bizarre things I've ever watched. I was curious if I would still think that.
The answer is ... yes and no. It is still utterly bananas (details to follow). But it's more evidently a descendant of the general batshittery of 1980s low-budget sci-fi and fantasy. It's very much that kind of thing, just with more comedy and sex.
It is still, however, bonkers. I remember watching the original run of TV movies on VHS tapes from our local indy video store (which had a lot of this kind of thing) and it's definitely got that sort of feel, the "discovered on a dusty shelf of low-budget sci-fi in the back of a video store in 1998" kind of vibe.
It's set in a gothic-Thunderdome space dystopia, a gloomy bureaucracy ruled by an immortal demigod called His Divine Shadow. Most of the tech looks like insects (paging Adrian Tchaikovsky! - visual reference of the main spaceship, a planet-destroying experimental ship that looks like a dragonfly). Most of the characters dress like they're auditioning for an 80s music video. The protagonists - a disgraced prison guard, a half-human-half-lizard space hooker (more on her in a minute), and an undead assassin who is the last survivor of a race of singing space warriors - escape with the ship, more or less by accident, and are catapulted into the Dark Zone, where things are somehow even more terrible than in the space dystopia, but in a whole new way. It's an hour and a half of towering citadels scored with ominous music and built on a budget of $2, sex jokes and boobs, weird hairstyles, and fights set to rock music. There's just enough found-family-in-space character development that I can remember why I liked it, while also remembering why I found it endlessly frustrating, because this show never met a touching moment it couldn't torpedo with a stupid boob joke.
Okay, so ... Zev, the half-human/half-lizard. I feel as if telling you Zev's backstory will give you an accurate idea of what the entire show is like. (Her backstory is also extremely fatphobic, which either didn't register on me in the late 90s, or I had forgotten about.) Zev is from the Wife Bank, raised for the purpose of being a wife, but suffers from a couple of problems - she's mentally noncompliant (stubborn and opinionated), and she is overweight. When she first meets her approximately-12-year-old husband for the first time, he calls her ugly, she punches him in the face, and she's sent to a dystopian prison world for the crime of "failing to perform her wifely duty." She is sentenced to be body-sculpted "beautiful" (read: thin), mentally brainwashed for compliance, and sent to be a sex slave.
This doesn't go as anyone planned when an equipment malfunction merges her DNA with that of a cluster lizard, a vicious reptilian alien predator. She emerges looking human, but is super-strong, can bite off people's faces when they annoy her, and can intimidate the other cluster lizards as a sort of dominant alpha lizard (this mostly involves screaming).
If you feel like you've just gone on some kind of acid trip while reading this, you now know what watching the show is like. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1426247.html with
comments.
The answer is ... yes and no. It is still utterly bananas (details to follow). But it's more evidently a descendant of the general batshittery of 1980s low-budget sci-fi and fantasy. It's very much that kind of thing, just with more comedy and sex.
It is still, however, bonkers. I remember watching the original run of TV movies on VHS tapes from our local indy video store (which had a lot of this kind of thing) and it's definitely got that sort of feel, the "discovered on a dusty shelf of low-budget sci-fi in the back of a video store in 1998" kind of vibe.
It's set in a gothic-Thunderdome space dystopia, a gloomy bureaucracy ruled by an immortal demigod called His Divine Shadow. Most of the tech looks like insects (paging Adrian Tchaikovsky! - visual reference of the main spaceship, a planet-destroying experimental ship that looks like a dragonfly). Most of the characters dress like they're auditioning for an 80s music video. The protagonists - a disgraced prison guard, a half-human-half-lizard space hooker (more on her in a minute), and an undead assassin who is the last survivor of a race of singing space warriors - escape with the ship, more or less by accident, and are catapulted into the Dark Zone, where things are somehow even more terrible than in the space dystopia, but in a whole new way. It's an hour and a half of towering citadels scored with ominous music and built on a budget of $2, sex jokes and boobs, weird hairstyles, and fights set to rock music. There's just enough found-family-in-space character development that I can remember why I liked it, while also remembering why I found it endlessly frustrating, because this show never met a touching moment it couldn't torpedo with a stupid boob joke.
Okay, so ... Zev, the half-human/half-lizard. I feel as if telling you Zev's backstory will give you an accurate idea of what the entire show is like. (Her backstory is also extremely fatphobic, which either didn't register on me in the late 90s, or I had forgotten about.) Zev is from the Wife Bank, raised for the purpose of being a wife, but suffers from a couple of problems - she's mentally noncompliant (stubborn and opinionated), and she is overweight. When she first meets her approximately-12-year-old husband for the first time, he calls her ugly, she punches him in the face, and she's sent to a dystopian prison world for the crime of "failing to perform her wifely duty." She is sentenced to be body-sculpted "beautiful" (read: thin), mentally brainwashed for compliance, and sent to be a sex slave.
This doesn't go as anyone planned when an equipment malfunction merges her DNA with that of a cluster lizard, a vicious reptilian alien predator. She emerges looking human, but is super-strong, can bite off people's faces when they annoy her, and can intimidate the other cluster lizards as a sort of dominant alpha lizard (this mostly involves screaming).
If you feel like you've just gone on some kind of acid trip while reading this, you now know what watching the show is like. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1426247.html with
comments.