Journey to the Center of the Earth (1989)

Too much of everything

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This movie should win or be in the category the worst film ever made. I cannot say anything good about it at all. The acting, writing, direction, scenery, and everything else is just so poor. However, I would actually recommend that you see this film just to believe that it was made. The first half of the film is about the journey to the center of the world. Then people go missing, some without any reason. Then the second half is about the lost city of Atlantis which I believe is the 2nd half of another film which they obviously thought would work together. It didn't. If you like B movies then it might be funny to you. But, to anyone else, it really sucks. Gave it 1 out of 10 because there is no option of 0 out of 10.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is the story of some tourists of Hawaii, three of them siblings, and one of them a young British nanny babysitting a dog. When the siblings accidentally drive off in their jeep with the basket of dog biscuits, the nanny follows them (it might've just been safer to purchase more) all the way to the cave the siblings intended to explore (I guess). For some reason, they actually go in the cave and then, when the place starts caving in, they try to get out to no avail, except for the six-year-old sister who they tell to go get help. Meanwhile, the more they move around in the cave, the more they continue to plummet further and further towards the earths cavernous core. And behold, it is here where they find the City of Atlantis and its bizarre alien habitants who are living under the oppressive rule of one alien that doesn't want them asking to many questions about the worlds external to their own.I see that Rusty Lemorande, the named director of the film has provided comments on this film, in which he explains that part of latter half of this film is actually the sequel to Alien in L.A. Well, whatever it was, it was an amazingly cheap movie that I would rank only slightly higher than City Limits (a 1988 sci-fi film also made on a non-existent budget) because at the least ending of this dreadful piece of mostly incoherent film-making that cuts corners where it can aims for some humor and amusement in the last 20 minutes when we finally see what life is like in the alien world at the center of the Earth. I also give it a two star rating rather than one because it was at times, funny, even if only in its subtleties. For example, the aliens asks the British girl if she's an alien and she explains that the Ministry should be sending her work visa shortly. Or when the alien girl finds Bryan and explains that he is in the city of Altantis and he mistakes this for Atlantic City, New Jersey. Little things like that make the idiocy of the first hour or so tolerable. Imagine how great the film could've been though if they had 1) actually intended to make it, and 2) actually had money to make it.I do like how in the end, no one wonders what happened to the little sister who was sent away in the beginning to get help. She'd just be wandering around the Hawaiian caves and not too far from the erupting volcano, mind you.

I'm the named director of the film. Only the approximately first 8 minutes of the film were written or directed by me. The remainder of the film is actually the sequel to "Alien In LA" which was tacked on and renamed "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in order to fulfill contractual commitments by the production company to foreign distributors. The remainder of the footage I shot (my film) has never been seen by the public (and few others) due to the lack of funds at the time to shoot and insert the many special effects shots required. The storyline of my version/script is entirely different from that in the above-titled film (the released version).

Rusty Lemorande's ' Journey To The Center Of The Earth ' should not be regarded as a sequel to Albert Pyun's ' Alien From L.A. '. Although released in the same year as that movie ( 1988 ) and utilizing some of the same sets and characters, Lemorande's ' Journey... ' actually pre-dates it, production having begun around 1986. Unfortunately, financial problems apparently halted filming and Pyun was later brought in to make the movie his own, the latter half of the story altered to tie-in with the release of ' Alien.. '.Loosely based on Jules Verne's classic novel and aimed squarely at a teen audience, ' Journey... ' is a fun science-fiction fantasy adventure that has a likeable young british nanny named Crystina ( Nicola Cowper ) plummet to the center of the earth whilst exploring the volcanic landscape of Hawaii with two young american boys, Richard ( Paul Carafotes ) and Bryan ( Ilan Mitchell-Smith of ' Weird Science ' ).The first half of the movie belongs to Lemorande and concerns Crystina's arrival in Hawaii and her eventual descent into the center of the earth. The latter half belongs to Pyun and has Crystina wander into ' Alien From L.A.'s ' punk underground world of Atlantis. The first half is the most interesting and showcases some truly amazing special effects. The latter half is less so and is somewhat slapdash in comparison.I would hope that one day ' Journey... ' will get a release in it's original cut. For snippets of Lemorande's original vision, very different from the final cut and edited into the movie as dream sequences, has Crystina and Richard captured by underground trolls and rescued by comic book fan Bryan! Who knows, maybe an alternate version of the movie will eventually see the light of day on a special edition DVD? It would certainly make interesting viewing.