Albert Pyun directs a lot of drivel... some entertaining and some just fucking painful. Sadly despite having a higher budget thanks to my guilty pleasure production company Cannon Films, Pyun took his resources and puked it onscreen giving us an almost unwatchable new wave, post apocalyptic vision of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Early. I bet you would have never guessed that from the title...The gorgeous Kathy Ireland plays our "alien". She's a geeky, squeaky voiced young woman who is the daughter of a famous geologist. When she gets notice that her father died, she quickly flies to the site where he passed on. He actually fell into a bottomless pit and predictably she falls into the same damn pit. In Alice in Wonderland fashion, our "alien" finds the lost city Atlantis... Atlantis like you never thought it would look! I always imagine Atlantis having a Roman or Greek look to hits structures but not in the mind of Pyun! Take Koopa's dinosaur city from the Super Mario Brothers movie, mix it with The Road Warrior and 80's new wave pop and you have Pyun's vision of the legend. All I have to say is... well nothing. It just left me speechless and not in a good way. She befriends a gruff miner (who we can barely understand) and finds out her father has been taken prisoner. Now a fugitive from the law, she must find a way to rescue her dad and get back topside. Of course we have some time to find a love interest!
Ireland is beautiful as ever and I could watch a neverending movie just to oogle over her beauty, but her high squeaky voiced portrayal of our heroine made my ears bleed and want to shut the damn thing off after only 10 minutes. The rest of the cast does the best they can with such a dismal script. The script is so damn bad that only the likes of Cannon would such drivel get any sort of a budget. Pyun also gives the film TOO much of a 80's new wave vibe. If there was a nuclear holocaust and only Boy George survived to repopulate the planet... Pyun's Atlantis would be the result. We also get the weird looking foreign guy from the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake as the ruler of Atlantis, complete with long pink eyebrows!
Despite the beauty of Ireland there isn't anything to recommend about this film. It just doesn't seem to have an audience as there are too many adult themes for kids and its' too God damn stupid for adults. I even enjoy many bad movies, including almost any cheesy B-movie produced by Cannon, but Alien From L.A. kept me looking at my watch for the damn thing to get over. Strangely enough Alien From L.A. would be followed by a sequel... well sort of. Apparently Albert Pyun started filming a sequel but the film got canceled so all the footage he shot got clobbered together with footage from another film and the result was the convoluted mess known as the 1989 version Journey to the Center of the Earth. That film has an interesting story all its own...
Written By Eric Reifschneider
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