When Super Nova ended Giggerota the Wicked had died, Kai’s
homeworld of Brunnis was destroyed by a supernova and he was no closer to
finding a way to re-animate himself.
In the third film of the Lexx
saga, Eating Pattern, Lexx informs the crew that he is hungry and needs to
eat in order to continue on their journey. Running out of food themselves, the
crew lands on a nearby garbage planet so everyone can get when they need.
Instead they find the indigenous inhabitants, led by the oddball Bog (Rutger
Hauer), who are addicted to a substance called “Pattern” that feeds a parasitic
organism they all are host to. The crew of the Lexx discovers that the drug is
made from human body parts and that they are next in line as donors.
After two interesting and fun films in this miniseries I
have to say that Eating Pattern is one of the most boring and directionless
movies I’ve ever seen. There is no point to any of the events at all, it’s
confusing and straight up dumb. Plot points are repeated ad nauseum and the
story is so drawn out that it’s basically a joke. Whenever I attempt to watch
this flick it takes me multiple tries to get through it because it’s so slow
and dull that I keep falling asleep. The last time I played it it took me three
days to do so. That’s pretty sad.
Have you ever seen an episode of a television show that is
uncharacteristically simple and streamlined compared to all the others? The
episode of Star Trek: Enterprise
called “Shuttlepod One” comes to mind. I read that the budget for the first
season was being burned up too quickly, so the writers came up with an episode
that wouldn’t require much money to produce. It took place mainly in a small
shuttlepod set with two actors and that’s all. That’s what Eating Pattern
reminds me of. The filmmakers were attempting to save money for the big finale
in the next film and had to compromise. This shit sandwich is the end result.
The worst part is that there is absolutely no further
development of the characters. The last two features excelled in that aspect,
but here it is stopped dead in its tracks. Basically all the main players are
reduced to idiots in order to allow the stupid developments of the plot to play
out. Stanley is inhabited by a parasite early on and goes “full retard”, Kai
runs out of protoblood and dies in the opening so he is missing for the
majority of the run time and Zev is turned into a damsel in distress. Only when
Kai is reanimated near the 2/3 mark do things slightly pick up, but not by
much.
The main issue that plagues this film is that the focus
switches from the main characters to Rutger Hauer’s Bog once he’s introduced. I
normally wouldn’t have a problem with that, but because Bog is such an idiotic,
bumbling and useless character he drags everything down to the deepest depths
of ineptitude. He shares a lot of screentime with Doreen Jacobi’s Wist, who
ends up being the cause of the parasitic invasion. She is bland and unengaging,
thus compounding the problems exponentially.
Visually this chapter is ugly and unappealing in the
extreme. I know that’s intentional since the setting is a garbage planet, but
it’s overwhelmingly cliché. It looks like every other garbage planet featured
in numerous other sci-fi flicks (Soldier
in particular). When the big finale goes down the special effects take a turn
for the worse as well with a supersized Wist attacking the Lexx. It’s
reminiscent of a Godzilla movie for a
few fleeting seconds, but then things get dumb again.
The acting is pretty bad all around. Even the main players
seem to be on autopilot due to the horrid script. Watching Rutger Hauer with
an odd ponytail and wearing lipstick making a complete fool of himself is
amusing at first, but he eventually begins to grate on the nerves and becomes
annoying beyond belief.
I really can’t say anything overly positive about Eating
Pattern. There are glimpses of what made the previous two films unique and
entertaining, but on the whole this is nothing more but a filler episode
stretched to bursting point. It’s nearly unwatchable.
0.5 out of 5
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