This is one I'd meaning to do for a while now, strictly for the Pyun factor, but it wasn't an easy find. Recently though it popped up on Multiplex On Demand, so I figured I'd better make it happen, especially since it has been a long time since we'd done a Pyun joint. Let's see how it went.
Journey to the Center of the Earth is technically a sequel to
Alien from L.A., except it's not. We follow Crystina (Nicola Cowper), a nanny from England who is hired and sent to Hawai'i to care for a rock star's dog. At the same time, a trio of siblings (Paul Carafotes, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, and Jaclyn Bernstein) are heading out to investigate a cave near a volcano. When the carrier containing the dog ends up in their jeep, Crystina has to follow them, and ends up exploring the cave with them. That cave leads to a tunnel that takes them to
Alien from L.A.'s lost city of Atlantis, where the people there are trying to recreate Kathy Ireland. Will they escape, or be trapped there forever?
The imdb page for this movie says this in its trivia section: "Director Albert Pyun hated how the studio took his film from him and spliced it with another film to just to have it released. Because of this he has disowned it and his name doesn't appear on any official releases." That's not entirely true, because he lists it on his site, Albert Pyun movies, but beyond that, it is listed as a Rusty Lemorande film, despite Lemorande saying he only directed the first 8 minutes--and Lemorande commented on the imdb and said that he had shot another movie that was supposed to be this, and of which 8 minutes was used. What do we do with all that information then? How do we make sense of this film, the same way we wonder how we make sense of his Urban Trilogy, which Pyun had to cobble together after a crate of film reels was lost by Air France, yet are still out there in the ether for us to consume. And like those Urban Trilogy films, this movie feels cobbled together, especially when we get into the
Alien from LA territory and we don't know how we got there or how we're getting back out in the short time we have left. In that sense, I think this is really about Pyun completists.
And in that vein, there are elements that work, in particular the cyber punk elements that he brought over from
Alien from LA. If anything, Atlantis is stylish and has the feel of an 80s music video--you almost expect Simon Le Bon to swoop in wearing torn clothing and paint on his face, saying cool, nonsensical things in his English accent. But before that, we're watching what can best be described as a wannabe
Goonies kids romp without the Feldman, and we're not really sure where it's going until it hits Leftturnsville and we're on the set of the "Wild Boys" video shoot. And you want to say, "well, you should have done this" or "tried that," but when we're talking about two movies cobbled together, none of that matters. It feels like two movies cobbled together because it is! If Cannon and Golan-Globus were trying to fulfill contractual obligations, is this worth it? Maybe, because it's still being shown on cable On Demand and people like me are watching it.
The issues Pyun had with making
Cyborg are well-documented, and fortunately now we have his edit of the film so we can compare the two, but that was another issue with Cannon, right after this film here. I don't know if those issues overlapped at all too, considering it's all around the same time, but it looks like those were the last two films he did for Cannon--and his first film after these two was the ultimate middle finger film,
Deceit. As I mentioned though, you do still see Pyun elements that you can recognize, like these cyber-punk characters in Atlantis. It feels very
Radioactive Dreams or
Vicious Lips, but also you can see how this evolves as we hit
Nemesis and
Omega Doom. A lot of his stuff from the past 10 years or so has been released entirely by him, which, on the one had can make it difficult to find it, but on the other, he has the control he needs, and with situations like these I can understand why he'd want that.
This goes back to something that I've learned in doing this site over the past 13 years. I always had this idea that each movie was the filmmaker's vision. Good or bad, this was their attempt to make a movie. But in talking Pyun about his experiences, and also other filmmakers like Jason Horton (who did the fantastic
Trap), is that that's not always the case. There are so many ways a film is taken from a director; or situations like one Jason Horton described in the film
Deceitful, where he was called in to make a film out of an idea that had gone through many revisions. On the one hand, I think it gives us more license to pan a film if we see issues with it; but on the other, we can pan the film in a general sense, without sticking it to one person--though maybe here we blame Cannon for what happened.
One of the bright spots in the film was the dog, which for me I think always works as long as the dog is well-treated, as he was here. I'm not saying I like a full on dog movie like
Beethoven or
Air Bud, but one where a good dog is part of the cast. I like cats too, but I feel like a cat moseying around in the background, cleaning a paw, maybe getting into something, works better for me, whereas I like the dog in the cast, taking naps, barking occasionally, and just acting cute. What's great too here, is we had Jaclyn Bernstein as the kid, and when the crew goes into the cave, she leaves, but the dog stays. More filmmakers should make that call when deciding between kids or dogs: dogs always work better.
And with that, I think it's time to wrap this up. For me this really is for Pyun completists. He doesn't have his name on it, and it's not entirely his film, because it's cobbled together from two movies. It's a fascinating anomaly from a great director who's a bit of an anomaly on the DTV scene. Right now you can stream it through Multiplex On Demand, or if you have Starz as part of your Amazon Prime package, you can stream it on there.
For more info:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097630
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