They
were decades ahead of the curve, making profitable films about terrorism long
before it became an overriding concern for Americans. Of course, Menahem Golan
and Yoram Globus happened to be Israeli, so they understood how dangerous the
world could be. Unfortunately, they were not as canny judging the American
marketplace with the releases that followed Invasion
U.S.A. and The Delta Force. Mark
Astley compiles a breezy oral history of their rise and fall in Electric Boogaloo: the Wild, Untold Story of
Cannon Films (trailer
here),
which opens this year’s 2015 Film Comment Selects.
Yes,
Hilla Medalia’s Cannon doc The Go-Go Boys
just played the New York Jewish Film Festival, but there is always room for
more Cannon. Reportedly, Go-Go is
considered the B-movie moguls pre-emptive attempt to tell their side of the
story. Hartley’s film even acknowledges the competition, comparing it to the
dueling lambada films the former partners rushed to the marketplace after their
contentious split. While Medalia spends more time on their early days in
Israel, Hartley delves further into the early history of Cannon before Golan
and Globus acquired it to serve as their Hollywood beachhead.
Plenty
of the executives, writers, and directors associated with Cannon fondly
remember the duo’s eccentricities, but there is not a lot of nostalgia coming
from Frank Yablans, the former MGM studio head, who was contractually obligated
to distribute their mid-1980s output. Hartley, who previously documented the
Australian exploitation cinema of the 1970s and 1980s in Not Quite Hollywood and surveyed the low budget foreign and
domestic action movies filmed in the Philippines with Machete Maidens Unleashed, not surprisingly shows an affinity for
the nuttier movies in their filmography, like the notoriously spaced out
futuristic rock opera The Apple and
Tobe Hooper’s sci-fi grand guignol, Lifeforce.
Of
course, it was their ill-conceived bids for Hollywood blockbuster
respectability with the peacenik Superman
IV and the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling epic Over the Top that would be their undoing. Frankly, it seems they
never really understood their true comparative advantage: action cinema. Cannon
really did take Chuck Norris to the next level and they substantially prolonged
Charles Bronson’s career. They also discovered a Belgian waiter named Jean-Claude
Van Damme. Unfortunately, they never really figured out what to do with their
potential breakout star Michael Dudikoff, beyond the completely awesome American Ninja franchise and never
recognized the untapped star-power of frequent supporting player Steve James
(who frustratingly goes unmentioned again, after being overlooked by The Go-Go Boys).
Hartley
marries up generous helpings of off-the-wall clips with some hilarious commentary
(it is especially nice to see Catherine Mary Stewart remembering The Apple with self-deprecating humor).
However, some of his talky head witnesses suggest some of the Hollywood resentment
of Golan and Globus was a dark product anti-Israeli, anti-immigrant sentiments,
which is a place Medalia’s film never treads. Boogaloo (taking its title from their ill-advised break-dancing
sequel) also gives the almost-moguls credit for successfully backing a number legit
art films, but it is less interested in this side of their business than Go-Go Boys.
