Meet Wanda. Our heroine. She has a voice like she's been sucking helium. She has the HUGEST glasses I've ever seen. They make me think of those giant novelty sunglasses. Her mother is dead. Her father is an archeologist working in Africa, and she hasn't seen in years. She lives with her Auntie Pearl in L.A. She's a waitress at her Auntie's rollerskate drive-in restaurant. Seriously. (Keep in mind this movie was made in 1987, not 1950.) She's also the most unconvincing actress EVER.

The movie opens with her whining at some athletic surfer boy, demanding he tell her why he doesn't like her anymore. On his list of complaints are that she gets car sick, is afraid of flying, has stupid glasses, ugly hair, a voice that gives him a headache, dresses like a geek.... "I'll change!" she pleads with him. "But you'll still be the same person," he says and goes surfing. Wanda moans a bit and whines and whines and whines to her friend, giving us a blatant backstory.

Then we have a different scene. A scholarly-type fellow is digging through an underground tomb of sorts. There are spiderwebs everywhere, which strike me as being rather odd for a deep underground tomb which was apparently sealed off. Also, he's wearing a white suit. What sort of idiot wears a white suit to go digging around in dusty tombs? With a black bow tie, no less! So, he goes through this tomb, which is filled with the usual heiroglyphs and dust and columns and skeletons. He comes to an arch and looks down the passageway. The end of the passageway is lit by a strong blue glare. Naturally enough, he takes out his flashlight and shines it into the blue glow. He walks down the hallway and then falls down a hole.

Back to Wanda. She has just received a letter from her father's friend in Africa. Where in Africa? We never find out. It's just Africa. Anyway, this letter sends her some really bad news. Wanda reports it to the restaurant chef and the audience with a surprising amount of awe in her voice.

"My father's dead. He fell down a bottomless pit."

That's when I knew I had caught a bad movie. A bottomless pit.

Anyway, she flies off to this mysterious African country to meet her father's friend. She starts digging through her father's stuff and finds some letter/diary/memo/note/confession that he wrote. It's his theory that long, long ago, a spaceship full of aliens called Atlantians landed on Earth to colonize the planet. Their ship served as their floating city until it sank. But Wanda's father believed that perhaps the city was still thriving at the center of the Earth!

I take some comfort in the fact that if this can be made into a movie, surely I can be published.

Wanda pokes around a little more, falls down a ladder, and ends up in the tomb we saw her father poking through earlier. She wanders around, lamp in hand, shouting out for her father -- despite the fact she's been told he's dead.

She finds the blue-lit hallway. She puts down the lamp, reaches into her giant purse, pulls out a flashlight, and shines it into the blue light. It must be genetic.

What follows is easily the best scene in the movie. She takes a step backwards and knocks a perfectly round stone out of place, sending it rolling through the tomb. Rube Goldberg would be proud of the result. It smashes through three skeletons. One skeleton goes flying across the room from the impact, hits a stone column, which topples, taking other columns out like dominos. The tomb begins to collapse. Wanda runs down the blue passageway and falls down the "bottomless pit."

Considering she fell on a stone floor and didn't suffer any injuries at all, how far could she have fallen? What idiot called it a "bottomless" pit?

She wakes up in a blue-lit, foggy, windy cave. A windy cave. Wanda, being the intelligent girl she is, shines her flashlight up the hole she fell through and shouts for help. She finds her father's pocketwatch, surmises he must still be alive, and wanders into a different part of the cave, where it's yellow-lit instead of blue-lit and fire bursts out of the ground instead of fog. She walks out into the middle of this fire field and discovers a prospector fighting off two claim jumpers.

Now, these prospectors, and most of the other people we'll meet in the movie, look strangely...out of proportion. Like midgets. Except they're about five feet tall, about Wanda's height. This, we shall discover, is the working class of Atlantis, the Trolls. And Wanda, to them, looks rather strange. "Big-boned" they call her. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So after helping this prospector, Gus, who speaks with an Australian accent, Wanda gets him to take her to Atlantis. She gets in the car, and it tips over. Her glasses break. She neither mentions them nor appears to need them again. I think the director finally got sick of her looking over the top of her glasses instead of through them and decided to smash them.

Atlantis. What to say about Atlantis. Well, I'll be a little brief and point out what caught my eye.

- Atlantian televisions always come in threes. Always. Often, they all have a slightly different view of whatever the heck is on but not always.

- Wanda is stupid, and despite being told to be careful takes every opportunity to tell everyone she comes from the surface world, which sends the government after her. Because she is an alien! Gasp!

- The costumes. OH MY. White face makeup and black eye makeup is apparently in style. It's the land of the Goths. Turbans are also chic. There's a bar full of waitresses and dancers wearing tutus, some of which look leather. There's a guy with a turban and an upside-down sun visor ON TOP of the turban. Wanda gets chased by a Goth Bag Lady with a hypodermic needle, who in turn takes her to a three-foot Goth Mafia man with THREE INCH BRIGHT RED EYELASHES. I swear I'm not making this up. They're all the way down his cheeks and the single scariest thing I have ever seen.

- Atlantians like to eat live bugs.

- The currency of Atlantis: The most valuable are "gold ones." The least valuable are "rusty ones." My favourite is the second most valuable, the "shiny ones."

- There is an unrelenting female voice saying over and over "Sector One Four Seven" or whatever three digit number is appropriate for the moment.

- "Charming." As in debonair. Also as in the gratuitous love interest. Charming is a teenage thief who saves Wanda. "Meet me in the bar," he says, kisses her, and we never see him again...almost.

- The Lordover. He isn't human. He doesn't look like anything. The only shots you see of him are from TWENTY FREAKING FEET AWAY. AT LEAST. He is wrapped in white cloth, has a deep, deep voice and sits in a big white chair that slowly revolves. I kept waiting for him to get sick and throw up.

- "Dr. Goggles." Or maybe it was Professor Goggles.

- After being rescued, Wanda's father stops running to look up at the city in amazement. "It's incredible!" "...It's a building." "No, it's a spaceship, that crashed 10 millennia ago!" Nice time to admire the scenery. YOU ARE BEING CHASED BY THE AUTHORITIES, RUN NOW PLEASE.

Wanda wakes up later and her Auntie Pearl is inexplicably in Africa. She goes back to L.A., is suddenly glamorous and sure of herself, and her old boyfriend tries to hook up with her again. Then Charming (remember him?) inexplicably appears in L.A. on a motorcycle and flirts with her. Cut to credits, complete with really, really awful and high-pitched 80s pop music.

Rating: three turkeys. A bit dull and saccharine, but nice and nonsensical if you're in the mood for it.