Alien from L.A. (1988)
Article 5999 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-21-2021
Directed by Albert Pyun
Featuring Kathy Ireland, William R. Moses, Richard Haines
Country: USA / South Africa
What it is: Lost civilization on Helium

A troubled young woman goes abroad to the reported deathplace of her father, only to fall into a hole that leads to Atlantis. She discovers her father is alive and wants to rescue him, but her presence is noticed…

I don’t know if that’s Kathy Ireland’s real voice or whether it was just adopted for this movie, but it really doesn’t matter; the primary effect of using this squeaky high-pitched voice is to strip every emotional resonance from her dialogue and makes her sound like a perpetual whiner, and since she was primarily a supermodel, she doesn’t have the acting smarts to overcome that. Furthermore, the vision of Atlantis here is woefully undeveloped; it seems to consist mostly of strange costumes, weird makeup and the everpresent smoke/fog that was probably there to obscure the cheapness of the sets. Combined with the fact that all of the scenes have the same messy, busy feel and there’s not an interesting story to be found, you end up with one of those movies you will never revisit because it wasn’t worth visiting in the first place. Dismal.