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.

Not so with this first of two 2-disc region 2 box sets (is that enough two for ya?). Each movie comes on its own individually packaged disc with bonus features and a nifty menu structure. Granted, these aren't really packaged like the other Lexx DVDs either, not even for region 2, but nobody's perfect.

The first disc, of course, kicks things off with the universe-building, backstory-heavy I Worship His Shadow. Anyone whose first exposure to Lexx occurred in the Xenia Seeburg years will be stunned, as I was, to see Eva Habermann's innocent-but-tough-as-nails take on Zev. Equally surprising is Michael McManus' "pre-death" portrayal of Kai - very few occasions have seen him play the role as anything other than a dispassionate dead guy, and while he does that very well, it's nice to see him show a little bit of fire here. Brian Downey's Stanley Tweedle is just, well, Stan. Guest starring in the first two-hour movie is Barry Bostwick in what has to be the weirdest costume he's donned this side of Rocky Horror, and playing a somewhat stereotypically macho rebel who, while instrumental in bringing together the Lexx crew as seen in the rest of the series, somewhat predictably gets written out of the show lest he take over the oddball cast of characters.

The first movie is a bizarre mix of elements, sometimes betraying the very low budget that the show started out with. There's everything from dodgy bluescreen shots (particularly during the cluster lizard attack) to stop-motion animation (Bostwick's character's talking "bug bomb"). To see these techniques alongside what is generally very good CGI can be a bit startling and jarring, but something about the characters, the storyline, and the universe they inhabit is compelling enough to distract from the mix-and-match production values. Adding to the strange feel of the first movie is Marty Simon's wicked music. Almost all of the major themes used later in the series are established here, and Simon gets really odd in a few places: the music for the bug bomb is incredibly grating - and yet perfectly fitting and still thoroughly enjoyable.

Accompanying the first DVD are two featurettes focusing on the creation of the show and its central concepts. These bonuses offer a revealing look into the thought that went into the series - while not plotted out in advance the way Babylon 5 was, Lexx did have a very clear game plan where the settings and "feel" were concerned. That first movie isn't as concerned with sex and innuendo as the weekly series would become, actually pushing the envelope a bit more (for its time) where violence and gore are concerned. The best part of disc 1's features is the original Paul Donovan-proudced sales film which was used to pitch the concept to potentially interested production partners. The short, essentially a word-for-word preview of a scene from I Worship His Shadow, is notable for Brian Downey's first appearance as Stan (with a mullet, no less!), and somewhat amusingly tracked with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. At the time, Donovan thought the show would be called "The Dark Zone."

Disc two, Supernova, presents us with an adventure much more along the lines of a regular episode, only the characters are still new enough to get some sexual tension gags out of them; still, much of the character interaction templates are set in stone here. Tim Curry turns in a bizarre guest starring role, though I like the visual dichotomy of viewscreens or "holograms" in the Lexx universe being video composited onto "real world" film. It's one of the more effective ways I've seen of making sure the viewer knows that something in this picture is visible, but isn't a physical structure.

The second disc's features consist of an interesting look at the show's use of CGI and virtual sets. It's not a very elaborately-produced documentary, but it makes up for that by being a very thorough and concise one, right down to explaining the chromakey process and why much of it uses green screen instead of blue screen. The other bonuses include bios of the three main actors and a minimal gallery of still photos.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief