Dirs. Rusty Lemorande and Albert Pyun
Journey To The Centre Of The Earth really takes the biscuit for how
unfinished a film can actually be when its released. Like an unfinished
building being opened up to the public, the complete lack of solid foundations
despite the thing still being able to support itself tentatively is startling,
and the holes are so obvious its more interesting to ask yourself what was
supposed to be in the spaces missing. Rusty
Lemorande has actually (presumably?) put up a brief piece of information on
this film's IMDB page stating that
only eight minutes of this film, at the beginning, are actually his own
creation, the rest presumably that of b-film director Albert Pyun. Originally an update of the Jules Verne story, only for something significant issue to take
place that, believing Lemorande's
thoughts, caused the project to become a Frankenstein stitched-up creation, it's
a case that, only seventy or so minutes long without the end credits, the whole
piece is an utter mess.
A British nanny ends up travelling
all the way to Hawaii for a job, only to end up having to look after a washed
up rock star's dog rather than a child like her job suggests. In screwy,
illogical circumstances she ends up in a cave, stuck, with two American
brothers and said dog. The film is pretty dreadful in the beginning, to the
point frankly that even if Rusty
Lemorande got to make his film, it may have been a poorer film than what it
is now. Completely leaden dialogue and character interaction that comes off as
lame, with a broad performance style that is wooden. Abruptly, as the
characters sleep, there are clips in dreams that feel like, in hindsight,
scenes originally recorded for the original context of the film. If not, how do
you explain an amusingly ghastly rescue sequence with a lazer gun, eighties
hair, and troll men who are literally giant rubber ornaments you can also wear,
who can only waddle around side-by-side and have no other form of movement let
alone bendable limbs to do so? It's incredibly generic filmmaking through this
beginning, everything that I really cannot enjoy despite there being a lot of
people who delight in these sort of eighties and nineties films. I view this without
the nostalgia of films like this being on video, because I grew up as an
adolescent with DVDs, nor the real interest in this kind of filmmaking because
it feels rudimentary than creative or insane like I prefer it to be. It's the
churning of gristle into dust. Creation of film for product only.
Things get a little bit more
interesting when, so far removed from an attempt at a Jules Verne story already, it completely abandons the notion of being
such a thing and turns into something different. It's still set for the rest of
the film in the middle of the Earth's core, so the title is still appropriate,
but after that questions have to be asked about what "adaptation"
actually means against this film's results. The perverse thing is that this is,
technically, deep into the material Albert
Pyun added, but I actually found it more interesting than what the film may
have supposed to have been. Suddenly the centre of the world is Atlantis, (water,
water not everywhere though, but let's not ask about that), a totalitarian city
populated by punks, new wavers and proto-steam punk fetishes. It's still got a
terrible broad sense of humour, especially when it comes to jokes about the
dictatorship of the city, Judge Dread
this isn't, but finally this gristle of movie has some layers on of some
curiosity. Elaborate sets and costumes even if made on the cheap and baring in
mind the possible production history of this whole work. Vaguely interesting
characters. A legitimately interesting idea where, after encountering an
"alien" from the surface world, a blonde female Californian, the
Atlantis military squandered its resources to transform willing participants
into exact duplicates of her, even in height and vernacular by rack and vocal
couching respectively, to spy on the surface without actually thinking
duplicates of a single person would immediately send off alarm bells above.
Then suddenly there's a freeze
frame. Random moments of a post apocalypse motorised gang attacking ruined
cityscape. Then we're back on the surface in front of a television screen, a
peaceful truce between Earth's surface and Atlantis having taken place. An
entire catalogue of possible events taking place in-between completely skipped.
The film just ends. Its befuddling honestly. Right when a film got vaguely
interesting, it suddenly ends because there wasn't enough material and/or time
to finish it. It vanishes half way through a sketch you paid to see and no one
knows what happened in the rest of the story to improvise, because it was
already garbled in its storytelling before it legged it. It fosters the
realisation you could release anything to cinemas even if its incomplete. It's
actually a Cannon Pictures release,
but their logo doesn't appear in the beginning. Only a few years later they
would close down, making this film's creation an ill omen in many ways. Either
way, even if it was finished properly, it would have either been vaguely
interesting but average, or just awful. Frankly as the mess it is its probably
memorable for a brief months, but would have disappeared in my mind immediately
if it was properly completed.
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