Lexx (1997)

[sholio]

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.

Comments

[yhlee]

WOW. I do feel like I just read an acid trip...

[sholio]

It was definitely everything I remembered and then some.

[sovay]

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.

I have for reasons only ever seen the third season of Lexx, but I loved it.

[sholio]

I only watched about a season and a half, maybe two seasons? I'm now reading the episode summaries of the rest of it on Wikipedia and laughing. You can almost feel the Wikipedia summarizer hitting increasing levels of "I don't even know how to describe all of this."

Goaded by the first lady, Priest does a deal with Stan to kill Prince, but ends up wiping out Orlando, Florida. In a plan to "save the presidency", he blames Cuba, but Prince isn't convinced, so organises a trip down Dealey Plaza to drill home the importance of loyalty, having the first lady sniped in a scene styled as a pastiche of the Zapruder film. Genevieve G Rota is elected pope, randomly from a real estate guide. A cat becomes possessed by a carrot.

[sovay]

A cat becomes possessed by a carrot.

I believe it. I was just trying to explain this show to spatch, with the result that I have now said sentences like "It's pretty representative of the show, actually: from one angle it looks incredible and from the other it's just balls."

[sholio]

That's pretty much the show, yeah.

[rachelmanija]

A cat... what?

[sholio]

A few episodes later:

The carrot probes invade US supermarkets, and leading scientists analyse how the carrots penetrate their hosts. The Whitehouse is overcome, so Prince, Priest, and Bunny flee to the Lexx, accidentally taking a carrot with them.

The name of the episode is "Bad Carrot."

How they penetrate their hosts

[rachelmanija]

Up the butt, right?

(I once was sitting at a restaurant where the people at the next table over were having an impassioned discussion of a movie whose title I heard as Up the Butt.. I eventually figured out that they had to be talking about In the Cut.)

[brightknightie]

Also, Nigel Bennett appeared in it.

I might have been able to forget the show ever existed, except that my FK brain retains this One Piece Of Trivia about it... :-)

[sholio]

He did! I think I watched a couple of his episodes even though I stopped watching in (IIRC) mid-season-two, because I was curious about him in a different role.

[rachelmanija]

I thought I knew where that was going until I hit the cluster lizard.

[sholio]

No one expects the cluster lizard.

[helen_keeble]

Honestly if you switched out the lizard for a charismatic apex predator, that character backstory would be AMAZING for a shifter rejected mates heroine.

(I’m picturing a world where shifter women get their animal as part of the mating ritual, and they’re MEANT to get brainwashed by meek submissive bunnies or mice or whatever. And instead the heroine gets a giant wolverine)

[rachelmanija]

Would read.

[thawrecka]

It's not without flaw but I loved Zev/Xev. (Name written two ways because she regenerated between seasons and slightly changed the spelling of her name?!?) She was my favourite! I watched the whole show all the way to the end. Granted, I was a teenager when watching it so the general aura of sleaze really appealed to me at the time.

[sovay]

Granted, I was a teenager when watching it so the general aura of sleaze really appealed to me at the time.

I remember enjoying not necessarily the sex jokes themselves, but the fact that the show knew exactly the ratio it wanted of high concept to low brow and gone full steam ahead for both.

[trobadora]

I remember Lexx! It felt wild at the time. (I don't think I ever watched more than a few episodes of the TV show, though - IIRC mainly because original Zev wasn't in it any more.)

[mific]

I remember it well! I loved it, back in the day, for its utter zaniness!

[hogwartstoalexandria]

Okay but this was a hilarious read, go you for making it through all of... whatever that was hahaha.

[chanter1944]

I remember this show being around, though I was a young teenager at the time. I knew just enough about it to be thoroughly convinced it was *not* my scene, and... well, I was right *facepalms*.

[philomytha]

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).

Why does this sort of equipment malfunction never happen to me?

This sounds absolutely amazing in a very specific way.

[anna_wing]

I remember that! It was fabulously deranged. I should buy the DVDs.

[leesa_perrie]

Oh wow!! That is just totally bonkers!! You sure the writers weren't on acid or something?! I never saw it the first time round, perhaps that's a good thing!

And I thought Farscape could be a bit crazy at times!

[ellenmillion]

That sounds amazing. Not "I will watch this" amazing, but I'm glad it exists so that I can read posts like this.

[lokifan]

Seconded, exactly!

[ivyfic]

This feels like it comes out of the same bucket as Cleopatra 2525.

[silverflight8]

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).

New life goal.

[gwyn]

I remember this being of a time and mentality with Cleopatra 2525, which was also similarly unhinged but starred Gina Torres. My friend was devoted to Lexx and kept trying to make me watch it, but despite Nigel Bennett, I found it too offputting. (There were some interesting vids for it, though, at...Escapade? Probably. I remember being at a con that had guests, even though it was a small fan-run one, and Nigel coming through the art show at the same time I was in there, and just being really super uncomfortable, even though they had a no porn policy). It's funny what an impact that show had in its own way.

[oracne]

I remember Cleopatra 2525!

[oracne]

I remember Lexx fondly! I don't think I ever saw every episode, but remember when Malcolm McDowell showed up?

A friend of mine was extremely into Kai.

[cornerofmadness]

Oh man, I hadn't thought of this in forever. I loved Lexx (and now that you mention it, Zev's backstory was very fatphobic. I don't remember it bothering me then but I'm sure it would now)

[rissabby]

Lexx was a guilty pleasure of mine. I loved some of the Kai bits, like when he buried himself up to his neck in a garden because decomposing and becoming compost is what the dead are supposed to do.

[willibald]

Lexx had its serious moments too. For all that Tweedle was despised for succumbing to torture and revealing the data hidden in his tooth, it should not be forgotten that he had another tooth (implied that contained data more important than the first.)