A while back, my wife sent me a top 25 list of MST3K episodes, and we've gradually been working our way through them during quarantine, at the rate of one or two a week. The boys love Mike and/or Joel and/or Jonah and the bots, so it's a nice time to gather 'round and laugh together. Because Facebook is basically my living room and I generally end up talking about bad movies with people in my living room, imma gonna do that now.
The first movie on the list is "Alien From L.A.," a Golan Globus production directed by Albert Pyun. People who are at all into B-movies are already groaning and rolling their eyes - Golan Globus and Cannon Films are among the worst studios ... ever, really, and Albert Pyun was one of their favourite directors because he was cheap, and worked fast. He's probably best known for the 1990 Captain America movie, which is as terrible a movie as can exist and is a part of the genuinely terrible decisions that nearly drove Marvel Comics out of business.
That’s a story for another time, though, as there’s more than enough terribleness in “Alien From L.A.” for me to talk about. The movie came out in 1988, and is … loosely science fiction, so, of course, it had to have a gimmick. The first involves a shy, unattractive, nerdy heroine making a journey to the center of a hollow earth where she meets threatening weirdos who teach her the real meaning of self-esteem, such that when she returns to the surface, she is a bolder, more confident person.
The second, stranger gimmick, is that the shy, nerdy heroine is played by Kathy Ireland. Yes, that Kathy Ireland. In order to make us believe that Kathy frickin’ Ireland is unattractive, they dress her as frumpily as possible, give her glasses so massive and thick they could be used to focus an industrial laser and instruct her to talk in a high-pitched voice that sounds like some combination of nails on a chalkboard and a small child screaming. It’s genuinely the worst part of the entire part, and you’d better believe that Mike and the bots take every opportunity they can to make fun of it.
Our movie begins with her dad falling to his apparent death “in Africa,” before cutting to Los Angeles where young Wanda Saknussemm (that is not a spelling error) is dumped by her hunky boyfriend (Don Michael Paul) because they’re incompatible. And, frankly, he’s right, because she’s freakishly annoying and he has at least the vestiges of a personality.
She gets the letter about her father’s death, which leads to some immediate questions. Her father’s “death” consisted of going up a set of stairs in what looked to be an Egyptian tomb in the basement of an abandoned house, completely alone. I mean, saying that her father vanished would make sense, but the plot requires that she be pining for her father for the entire movie, so, here we are. By the way, as Mike and the bots point out, her emotional reaction to absolutely everything is staring absently into the middle distance, so we don’t get much actual pining. This is par for the course with a Pyun film - the plot and characters just sort of mill around on screen for the running time of the movie, and then it ends. Aren’t you looking forward to the plot description?
Well, it’s pretty short, really. Wanda heads off to “Africa,” where she goes to the same abandoned house and falls down the same hole at the top of the same stairs. She wakes up in an underground dystopia that looks like every single lava level that every single video game in the 90s had, with mostly red and purple rocky backdrops and periodic gouts of flame. There she and an underground dweller face off against a group of toughs where she learns that the underground is pretty much a hardscrabble dystopia, and loses the first layer of her unattractiveness - those massive glasses and her frumpy over-sweater.
And here’s where the meandering begins. She and the underground dweller, who inexplicably is attempting an Australian accent, go to the big city where it turns out that people from the surface world are wanted, for reasons. Well, sort of. For some reason, the powers that be don’t want anyone to be aware of the surface world, which is why they announce that she’s in the city over their public address system. After a costume change, she ends up hunted in a confusing series of “action” shots where she loses and gains at least two additional male love interests before finding her father and returning to the surface world. We close with her confronting her formal male love interest, now dressed as one expects Kathy Ireland to be dressed in the 80s - in a revealing bathing suit.
That’s … that’s it. That’s the movie, folks. It’s one hour and twenty-seven minutes of Kathy Ireland talking in a high-pitched, nasally voice and a whole bunch of questionable costume choices.
Final Rating: D-. This is a low rating, even for an Albert Pyun file, but even for him this is a cheap, generic sort of movie. There isn’t a single scene worth watching, really, and despite its short running time it still manages to feel plodding and slow. Do not watch without the MST3K crew, or an equal astute group of jokesters.
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