:: theLogBook.com DVD Reviews ::

featuring the episodes Little Blue Planet, Texx Lexx, P4X and Stan Down

Reviewing the fourth season of Lexx on DVD is an interesting challenge, and perhaps a unique one in the history of this site’s DVD review section, and the challenge comes from the fact that, for the most part, I actively dislike the fourth season. As with the third season, there’s quite a bit of it that I hadn’t seen, so perhaps I’ve made a hasty judgement, but the fourth-year segments that I have seen have - with a handful of exceptions - always left a bad taste in my mouth. A very bad taste. So when I popped the first volume of season four into my DVD player, I issued it with a challenge: make me like it. I needed to reacquaint myself with the entire season anyway, for the Lexx LogBook, so I tried to go into with an open mind. (more…)

featuring the episodes 791, Wake The Dead, Nook and Norb

This third slice of Lexx’s second season presents us with a couple of the show’s most hilariously demented episodes ever in the form of 791 and Wake The Dead. 791 concerns the fulfillment of robot head 790’s wish to acquire a body with which to woo Xev, though things go just a little bit wrong and 790 winds up being taken over the personality of the body’s previous owner - a twisted soul who lusts not for Xev, but for Stanley Tweedle! (more…)

featuring the episodes Fire & Water, May, Gametown and Boomtown

Kicking off a season-long story arc, although spread out across a shorter-than-usual season, this first volume of Lexx’s third season kicks some apple carts over early in the proceedings, and doing something typically Lexx in picking up the story several thousand years after the end of the last season. Fire & Water sets the stage for the season by introducing Nigel Bennett as the formidable villain Prince (hey, at least he’s not The Villain Formerly Known As Prince), and serving up a flashback to explain why our unlikely heroes have been out of commission for so long. (more…)

featuring the episodes Viva Lexx Vegas, Trip, Lyekka Vs. Japan and Yo Way Yo

So here we are, at the end of the Lexx saga. This final DVD in the series has some of season 4’s best, so it’s not that painful this time around.

If anything, Viva Lexx Vegas may well be the last gasp of the Lexx that I came to know and love - there’s hilarity, absurdity, jeopardy and innuendo all in the right doses. Of course, this would be expected of the crew’s visit to Sin City. (more…)

featuring the episodes Dutch Treat, The Game, Haley’s Comet and Apocalexx Now

It is with great trepidation that I come to this volume, for it contains one of my personal favorites, as well as a segment that’s just irredeemably awful.

Dutch Treat is just plain weird, but enjoyably so. Any episode that culminates in a gigantic, city-sized bug-spaceship eating Holland in a single gulp can’t be all bad. (more…)

featuring the episodes Lafftrak, Stan’s Trial, Love Grows and White Trash

Consistently hailed by fans as an all-time classic installment of the series, Lafftrak opens this disc with a uniquely Lexxian look at reality TV. Not the most original concept ever committed to film, the crew goes looking for entertainment, only to find that they have become the main attraction for an unknown audience. The innuendo’s off the scale with this one, though things get good and wacky when Kai enters the picture. Keep an eye out for writer/producer Lex Giggeroff in a number of bizarre guest roles here. (more…)

featuring the episodes Mantrid, Terminal, Lyekka and Luvliner

This first volume of Lexx’s second season kicks off with Mantrid, an episode that resolves a complication hinted at in the last of the Lexx TV movies. Terminal makes things slightly less murky with a scenario devised specifically to see off series regular Eva Habermann, who really only reprised her role in the season’s first two hours as a favor to the producers before returning to her career in Germany; it’s an interesting analysis and exit for her character, as well as a set-up for Xenia Seeburg taking over the role. (more…)

Moving at what seems like a breakneck pace after the plodding Eating Pattern, Gigashadow resolves the story of the crew’s escape from His Divine Shadow (the wraithlike adversary in the first movie) and explains the origins of that enemy as well, and while all these doors are being closed, new ones are being opened as a lot of pipe is laid for the first season of hour-long episodes. And that’s a pretty ballsy move on the part of Paul Donovan and friends, who didn’t even know for certan that the second season would happen. (more…)

Easily the weakest of the four original Lexx movies, Eating Pattern doesn’t just resemble a weekly hour-long episode, it resembles an uninteresting weekly hour-long episode stretched out to two agonizing hours. Of the four movies, it involves the main characters the least (Kai spends much of his time wandering around, while Zev is chained up helplessly and Stanley is possessed by an alien parasite), and after we’ve already had two movies with Giggerota, the cannibalism schtick just doesn’t have the punch-in-the-stomach shock horror value anymore. (more…)

As is the case with the DVD release of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, the four movies that kicked off the saga of Lexx are available on DVD overseas only due to a tangled web of distribution rights in North America. When the Lexx movies premiered (over a year before the weekly series appeared), distribution rights in the U.S. went to the Showtime cable network - and Showtime has hung onto those rights ever since. While the rest of Lexx is gradually becoming available on region 1 DVD, there’s no indication we’ll ever see the movies outside of Canada-only releases, and in the meantime the North American VHS releases have been packaged like low-budget direct-to-video flicks, with no indication on the packaging that the four movies have anything at all to do with the series proper. (more…)