Trekkies Two
Review: Denise Crosby boldly goes into fandom once again.
In her second fan foray, Next Generation actor Crosby (you remember, Tasha Yar, killed by an oil slick in season one) has gone global, so we get to see how Trekkies differ across the world.
Cue a wealth of national stereotypes - the Germans are highly organised, Italians love food and family, in France even the Trek fans are cool, and in Brazil they're babes. In fact, it's probably the UK and the US fans who come out of this worst, mostly coming over as pedantic obsessives suffering from low-level depression.
It's the nature of documentaries like this to concentrate on the extremes, and they certainly are extreme here. Rather unfairly, British fans are represented almost entirely by Trek DIY enthusiast Tony Alleyne, the guy who decorated his flat like the Enterprise D. "My wife had left me at the time," he explains. "åIf I hadn't have built this, the other way was to go down the endless pitå" "Ri-ight," Denise says, eyeing the camera crew anxiously.
At least he can nip down to Ikea for a few rolls of lining paper and a new sofa if he changes his mind, unlike the large Australian lady who has the stars of Enterpise tattooed on her back. And compared to the US fan who always wears her uniform, even when doing jury service, or even the one who dresses his cats in Starfleet uniforms, our Tony's pretty normal really.
Away from the lunatic fringes, Trekkies 2 consists largely of interviews with sweet, enthusiastic young people who like dressing up to celebrate their favourite programme. Which is nice, and they're all very dear things, but it does get a bit repetitive after the first dozen or so of them explain how liking Trek gives them something unique about themselve.
There are some diamond moments though - two German teenagers dressed as Jem'hadar explain how their mothers made the costumes, French fans actually admit to the possibility of bad Trek episodes, and an amateur dramatics group perform a version of Romeo and Juliet based on Original Trek episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
Best fun comes from the Trek tribute groups, especially Klingon rockers Stovokor and stomp punk band No Kill I: The Next Generation (sample lyrics: "Riker gets laid a lot. Troi has a great big butt"). They're hilarious, because they're obviously having such a laugh themselves. Let's hope they do a UK tour together.
Extras on the disc include an incredibly large quantity of deleted scenes - almost another film's worth, a trailer, and a couple of fan films mentioned in the documentary. Which, like all amateur films, have that wooden, unpolished look more normally associated with porn.
Trekkies 2 is released in the UK on 7 March.
Send us your comment now. We'll publish the best on this page.
There are no comments yet.
Thank you for your comments. The BBC reserves the right to modify any messages before appearing on this web page.
World of Cult web guide:
Groovy good looks
