The fanciful tale of a young girl’s descent into the underground world of Atlantis, ‘ Alien From L.A. ‘, Albert Pyun’s homage to Jules Verne’s ‘ Journey To The Center Of The Earth ‘, is a engaging piece of sci-fi whimsy that makes the most of it’s minimal budget.

Kathy Ireland as squeaky voiced teen Wanda makes a delightfully offbeat heroine, plummeted towards the centre of the earth whilst searching for her explorer-adventurer father in Africa, missing and presumed dead. The underground world of Atlantis that she stumbles upon is realized as a rather intriguing punk domain with many unusual quirks – non-welcoming to visitors of the surface world.

Nowhere near as bad as it has been suggested, ‘ Alien From L.A. ‘ remains a fun adventure romp for non-too serious fans of the genre. Interestingly the characters and visuals of the movie were re-hashed to complete the latter half of Rusty Lemorande’s own ‘ Journey To The Center Of The Earth ‘, released in the same year. Although ‘ Journey… ‘ actually pre-dates ‘ Alien… ‘ ( production having begun around 1986 ), it was apparently beseiged by financial problems and Pyun was later called in to make the movie his own. This has given people the false impression that ‘ Journey… ‘ is a sequel to ‘ Alien… ‘ when it is not.