It’s not hard to appreciate the impulse to turn supermodels into movie stars, despite the fact that it has never actually worked. Here you have someone who is already famous and who has already shown a tremendous ability to look fantastic in front of camera. What could possibly go wrong?
To answer that question, I give you Alien from L.A.
There is no doubt that Kathy Ireland had an arresting onscreen physical presence. The word “hot” in this case would be most à propos, especially if it was preceded by the words “goddamn” and “fucking.” But, just like many famous silent-era stars whose careers ended when talkies took over the medium, the power of Ireland’s charisma is tragically undone each and every time she opens her mouth and does us the tremendous discourtesy of allowing words to escape from it.
Cursed with the kind of voice that causes dogs to howl in misery whenever she speaks, her is further diminished by a script that requires her to essay the role of the whiniest protagonist in the history of narrative storytelling. At times, the dialogue suggests that this was a deliberate choice on the part of director/co-writer Albert Pyun. Forced to cast Ireland as his lead, he obviously decided to turn her greatest weakness into the film’s main running joke, but chose to do so in a way that only makes watching it more of a chore than it might have otherwise been.
The nominal plot concerns a California waitress (Ireland) going to Africa in order to find out more about her absentee (and presumed dead) father, only to fall down the same hole he did and become trapped in the underground city of Atlantis. To say that Alien lacks dramatic momentum is something of an understatement. The only memorable scene comes at the very end, where Ireland is finally shown in the kind of outfit that got her the role in the first place. It’s almost worth the previous 90 minutes, but in this day of Google, you can easily find similar pictures of her in similar outfits and never once fear that she might ruin it all by saying something. —Allan Mott
try watching this film twice. Never made it through the whole movie.
It does make for an extraordinarily long 85 minutes.
Back in 87 I worked at a movie theater that had the trailer for this movie in its rotation. That trailer and the MST3K episode with it are all I remember of it now.
MST3K never came to Canada when it was originally on, so I’ve only ever seen the episodes released on home video, which makes me sad, because it likely means this is one I’ll never get to see them riff through.