I’ve watched a lot of Albert Pyun’s films and it is hard to predict exactly what you are going to run into when you sit down to watch one of them.
After all, he worked in the jungle of direct to video production companies, making films for next to nothing in odd corners of the world, making whatever film he could promote, whether it was the sort of film he was interested in making or not.
It would be easy to dismiss his work as terrible, but many of his films are quite good — by direct to video standards — and his best films are weird and quirky. He was even known to indulge in a few strikingly experimental features — like Deceit, a three player (although mostly just two) drama in a single set, or Invasion, which was shot entirely on a dashboard camera.
Alien from L.A. was one of his earliest films — his sixth — and came out only six years after his first film, The Sword and the Sorcerer, made him an overnight cult director. It got its start in a classic low-budget film sort of way, as a by-product of another film’s failure: Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus didn’t like the rough cut of their latest film, a version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (which, as has been true of nearly all Jules Verne movies ever made, had little to do with the source material), so they decided to hand it off to a new director. Albert Pyun offered to do the job for free (and unbilled!) if they gave him a million to make his own film.
Which, incidentally, was his take on the Verne novel.
Although, to be fair, Alien from L.A. has less to do with Verne than any other Verne movie ever made Even if it does borrow a familiar name from the original source.
Wanda Saknussemm (supermodel Kathy Ireland) — a shy, socially awkward girl with glasses who works as a waitress — is all alone: she lost her mother long ago, while her father, Professor Arnold Saknussemm, has ignored her because he was obsessed with his search for evidence for the survival of Atlantis deep within the Earth.
The same day her boyfriend dumps her because she is too timid and unadventurous, she learns that her father died in Africa when he tumbled down a bottomless shaft. Even though airplanes terrify her, she screws up her courage enough to use the plane ticket her father’s partner sent her, and flies off to Africa.
But the night she gets there, she hears a noise and discovers the secret entrance to her father’s dig site.
And moments later, she falls down the same shaft he did…
Now we all know that Atlantis is down there waiting for her, but it does come as a bit of a surprise that it proves to be a grim, Blade Runner-meets-Brazil sort of city, full of criminal gangs, government spies, and soldiers.
So we have a mild sort of adventure story, where Wanda stumbles from one situation to the next, trying to find her father, while one of the rulers of this subterranean land is after her, to prevent anyone from learning of the existence of the surface world.
Supposedly, Pyun picked Kathy Ireland based entirely on her photo, and she had to take acting lessons as she’d never been in a movie before. She was glad, though, that the character changed from a sassy Madonna type to someone nerdy and shy because she could draw on the awkward stages of her life.
Which is something a lot of young women out there need to hear these days from someone as poised and successful as Kathy became.
I actually liked her in the role, even with the deliberately annoying voice. And Pyun did surround her with some talented people (although it seems odd to watch an Albert Pyun film without Norbert Weisser). I always enjoy seeing Deep Roy (partly because he played all those Oompa Loompas, but mostly because he was Mr. Sin in one of my all time favorite Dr. Who episodes) who goes way over the top as the town’s biggest gangster.
However, it seems very strange that at least four of the cast play multiple roles — and, I’ll note, at least one of them plays two different important characters within the underground world. My impression (from the little information I have) is that most of them played a role in both the L.A. and underground sequences.
One immediately thinks of The Wizard of Oz, but there is no dramatic reveal (“…and you were there — and you were there too…)
In fact, I would argue that Alien from L.A. is closer to Alice in Wonderland than it is to Jules Verne or The Wizard of Oz, as we have a child falling down a hole and finding a strange new world.
The biggest problem is that the “Atlantis” sequences look murky. I’m sure it didn’t help that I wasn’t watching it in HD, but these scenes are gloomy and dark, with a lot of dingy colors. A large part of it was filmed in mines and tailings heaps in various African countries (guess where Golan and Globus had some money they were having a hard time getting out of the country?) but however weird and strange they might have looked, they aren’t very colorful, and whatever fascination they might have had just gets lost in the murk.
Ironically, many sources have labelled Cannon’s Journey to the Center of the Earth a “sequel” to Alien in L.A., because Kathy Ireland puts in a brief appearance as Wanda Saknussemm.
But don’t get fooled, and definitely don’t bother watching it. By all reports it is plain awful, Wanda or no Wanda.
It’s hard to know how to respond to a film like this. It is a mildly enjoyable, if very familiar, adventure film — but, at the same time, it is murky and dark, with very little visual flair.
Oh, well.
Pyun made better films, and you are far better off watching Cyborg, or Deceit, or Dollman.
Or any of quite a few other films far better movies he made…
rivets on the poster 
One thought on “Alien from L.A. (1988)”