Albert Pyun

  • Alien from L.A. (1988)

    Alien from L.A. (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Both ambitious and terrible, Alien from L.A. has ended up as a minor cult movie for a reason — sure, an MST3K appearance has helped, but it takes a special kind of audacity to propose no less than supermodel Kathy Ireland as a mousy shut-in nerd, or to portray an underground civilization of aliens with a threadbare budget. Producing company Cannon Group and director Albert Pyun have seldom courted mainstream success, and so the result of their efforts here is a strange mixture of silliness and incompetence, grand ambitions and haphazard execution. Sure, it’s slightly amazing to see an ultra-low-budget trying to create an alien society with crowd sequences — it makes a bit more sense once you learn that Alien from L.A. was shot in South Africa for even greater budgetary efficiency. The plot barely holds together, what with a father having fallen into a hole, an underground spaceship, bland plotting contortions and some severely underwhelming execution. Ireland squeaks her way through some terrible dialogue, but the film does swing for the fences at times, especially in trying to portray something outside human existence. Still, ambition isn’t necessarily an achievement by itself, and for all of the film’s welcome weirdness, it struggles with being anything other than a curio. Still, I’ll take a curio over anything forgotten five minutes after the credits roll — and for all its faults, you will remember Alien from L.A. for a while.

  • Arcade (1993)

    Arcade (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2020) There’s no doubt that Arcade is a terrible film, and I find myself hesitant to cut it any slack for being a film about immersive videogames that came out at the dawn of the CGI era. It’s clearly terrible-looking—anyone who was around back in 1993 will instantly recognize the low-end awkward CGI that is meant to be the showcase of the film, as our teenage heroes immerse themselves in a form of virtual reality. (This being said, the CGI was not bad for the time and budget.) Other than Megan Ward and Seth Green in small roles, John de Lancie is the only recognizable name here as a scientist who realizes that his creation has taken a life of its own thanks to some terrible decisions. (Note to self and anyone else: using an abused dead boy’s brain cells in your AI development is really just asking for trouble.) But even if you’re feeling generous on the special effects, the rest of the film is not particularly good—while the script is an early piece of juvenilia from David S. Goyer (who would go on to write much, much better material), it’s directed by infamous B-movie mogul Albert Pyun, so the results are roughly what we’d expect. There are no surprises, no scares and no big ideas in Arcade, even accounting for a 1993 production date: even if some of this material might have felt fresh during the first year of Wired magazine, it’s all hopelessly trite now, and more of a period piece than something worth watching for itself.