Alien from L.A.

Alien from L.A. (1988)

The people at the center of the earth are about to get a visitor.

When her archaeologist father disappears on an expedition, Wanda sets out to look for him. What she finds is a secret underground world, where no one believes in life on the surface and where she and her father are taken for spies.

Date of release
1988-02-26
TMDB
3.5 / 10 (76)
Runtime
1h 27m
Genres
Family, Science Fiction, Adventure
Director
Albert Pyun
Collection
Alien from L.A. Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

Alien from L.A. is a 1988 American science fiction film co-written and directed by Albert Pyun. The film stars Kathy Ireland as a young woman who visits the underground civilization of Atlantis. The film was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. This film is loosely based on Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth with some minor allusions to The Wizard of Oz.

Production

During the troubled production of the Rusty Lemorande-directed Journey to the Center of the Earth, producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, dissatisfied with Lemorande's rough cut, approached Albert Pyun to finish the film. Pyun accepted the job, saying he would finish the film for free if they allowed him to film Alien from L.A.

Kathy Ireland was chosen by director Albert Pyun after seeing a photo of her, and without doing a screen test. Ireland had little acting experience at the time, stating "No one was more surprised than I was," also saying that she took acting lessons after being cast. The film was Ireland's debut in a major motion picture.

Ireland says that changes were made to her character between the time when she was cast and when filming began: "And when I got on the set I found out that they had changed my whole character around which surprised me but I liked her better. When I read for the part she had been a flirty Madonna type. They had changed her to a geeky clumsy shy type of girl which I liked better.

The filming locations for the film include Los Angeles, Redondo Beach, South Africa, and Namibia. Pyun was asked by Cannon to film in South Africa due to positive relations between the Israeli Globus and Golan, as well as their desire to use "blocked funds" that could not be taken out from the country per South African government mandates.

The film was mostly shot in Johannesburg at producer Avi Lerner's studio, plus additional shooting in Durban, South Africa and Swakopmund, Namibia. Locations included South Africa's deep-digging mines and gold fields, both on the outskirts of Johannesburg. There was one additional day of shooting at a safari complex near Pretoria.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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