Starhyke

This series is just not funny. I bought it from ebay after seeing Claudia Christanson was in it. Loved her in Babylon Five but I can only assume she is in need of a quick pay slip if she agreed to do this.

Starhyke is a comedy without any jokes. There is no real plot beyond the basic idea, each script just feels like nobody cared. That as long as there was a long enough running time nobody involved in making this cared what anyone said or did.

claudia does her best but seems slightly bemused, jeremy bullock and the actors who played reg and vilma make more effort than this deserves but the rest of the cast do literally nothing to make this better.

FX are decent but even fan films have good x these days.

At first, I thought it was a cartoon. The special effects were just animations.

The script and acting was atrocious, but worst of all was the background music.

This music single handedly ensured I stopped watching after the first fifteen minutes. Why oh why have such annoying music playing all the time? There is no rhyme or reason to it, and doesn't change with what's happening on screen.

Terrible.

When you were in third grade did you have that weird friend who thought it was hilarious to make fun of Star Trek by calling it Star Feck with characters John Leak Pee-hard and Do-me-onna Toy? It turns out that his idea of growing up was to change the names to Captain Belinda Blowhard and Chief Engineer Sally Popyatopov. Whatever potty humor he had before he increased ten times. He still chuckles and blushes when people mention sex. Green clouds appear when characters fart. His idea of intellectual humor is having a half-android character confuse an order to "scan" for (imagine) "scat" and start vocalizing. The thing is, these actors *could* have acted. Some of them have real careers (and some sadly seem to have gone nowhere, so we'll never know). But they have almost nothing to work with here. But.... BUT there is just enough to make you wonder what happened. In the first episode they are emotionless characters because all humans have had their feelings suppressed. This means they are contributors to the genocides of thousands of alien races. Now suddenly they have their emotions back, and they maturely decide to... boink each other (off camera, of course), install a chocolate fountain, get drunk on this strange thing called al-co-hol, and boink some more. This could have been a redemption story about how people could change from being the borg-like villains to becoming heroes. It could have been commentary on nationalism and fascism. There's even a side plot about some unknown force getting in their way and sabotaging things for nefarious purposes, which doesn't really start to go anywhere until episode six -- the last episode, with a big "To Be Continued" at the end. And it never continued, of course. It was never even released until many years after it was filmed, so they had a pretty big clue that it wasn't going to be continued. If the whole series would have been like most of that episode, it probably would have gotten at least five stars. Actual humor would have gotten it to four. Three stars is generous.

I love sci-fi, am a huge fan of Claudia Christian in the Babylon 5 universe and I love sci-fi comedy like Red Dwarf, The Orville etc. But they need to have a decent plot and the humour has to be well...funny. This is just bad slapstick with lots of sexual jokes with a weak ill thought out plot set in sci-fi spaceship setting. The acting is awful. Even Claudia - by far the best in the cast - isn't at her best. If you must torture yourself, watch it with friends and have something else going on,.

There are some very different opinions on this series. Having recently watched it, it deserves a lot of the criticism, but not all.

The pacing is a problem, for a start. It needed to pack more action/dialogue/gags in, but it often seemed that the cast were pausing for a laugh track that was never added.

The humour is not up in Red Dwarf territory, but the series does improve as it goes on. The scriptwriters certainly knew the genre they were sending up. But by the end, I could see why it didn't get a second series.

Enjoyable in parts, slow, sometimes clumsy, often showing the limits of the budget, could have been better in many other ways too... but quite likable, in its own confused way.