Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2015)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Sorry, I just couldn't fully get behind this film; Canon group littered video stores of the 80's with bad taste action, horror and camp teen-comedy B-movies, a few of them will stand the test of misty nostalgia (if you were fourteen when you saw American Ninja, or Barbarian, or whatever) but the films are mostly garbage. This documentaries third act gets all sentimental about Canon's rise and demise but, honestly, the only thing the producers were interested in was money; they raised enough money to run overseas distribution, invest in cinema chains and also obtain the rights to a classic film library, but then it all collapsed because, like the bad filmmakers they were, they made the classic bad business decision of over- investing, over-expanding and over-predicting how well their (terrible, embarrassing, sexist, cheap looking) movies were going to do at the box office.It DOES stand to reason that Canon are sometimes hilarious, and their one surprise mega-hit of a one million dollar budget earned about 74 million worldwide. This is unusual, and is a success story, but then the film was also nasty, derivative, mindless and probably more sexist than most other video releases of it's year. Why the interviewees claim at the films end that the Canon legacy is important is unclear; they paved the way for lowest-common denominator interests over intelligence and substance, and of course pre-sales, a concept that means a film will usually be generic in type, but the rights to distribute a movie are sold before it's actually made. Typically Menahem Golan would make up strings of improbable rubbish at meetings to try and please anyone anywhere that would finance a picture, based on the evidence of a gaudy poster and the "star quality" of people like Chuck Norris, or Michael Dudikoff. Time wastey.

Rewind the tape and slap it on. This is pure nostalgia-fest for those of us of a generation. I'm sure if IMDb was around back then, we'd all have been writing up reviews slamming their films and chutzpah at throwing at us much of the dross they did.Yet, many of us actually loved a lot of their old fare. The action movies at a certain age were superb fun and ridiculously good. They might have been low budget put together with the script last in line, but they still were entertaining. It kind of was the last true B-Movie era.In the UK, video was king for a number of years, and nobody exploited that market better than Cannon. I lapped up many of their films. It's wonderful to see in this documentary all the old names and how lovingly they look back, in humour as much as all else. Its terrific.Okay, the films were practically all garbage, and I've probably grown up to be too much of a film snob now to sit back and enjoy going through their movies again. However, I will be revisiting some of their old fare in one way or another, and this film reminded me of what a wonderfully silly time the video days in their heyday truly were.Thanks Cannon, from a guy who owes you a great deal.

Colorful documentary on Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, cousins from Israel who forged a filmmaking partnership in 1970s Los Angeles after breaking ground in their homeland with local dramas directed and often written by Golan. Taking over Cannon Films, the duo had some early successes before succumbing to B-movies, cut-rate sequels, ninja flicks and gory screamers. A distribution deal with MGM/UA goes sour when Golan and Globus deliver the company nothing but junk, further cementing the wildly enthusiastic producers' reputation for quick, cheap trash. Looking back, Golan and Globus had the right attitude for making movies--no bull, cut to the chase, film the script--but without good judgment in the filmmaking world, and the folly of newcomers with money but nothing decent to film, they became the bane of '80s Hollywood. Cannon did attract directors like Franco Zeffirelli and John Frankenheimer, but mostly names on the wane (an amusing phone call has Golan trying to lure Peter Bogdanovich's people into having the struggling director work with Cannon: "He a loser. He needs to work with winners."). Cannon's legacy is, sadly, Chuck Norris action movies, "Death Wish" sequels, 1984's dated hit "Breakin'" and the critically-acclaimed "Runaway Train"--but with so much garbage clogging its resume, the film group was bound to go down in flames. It ain't "That's Entertainment!" **1/2 from ****

A one-of-a-kind story about two-of-a-kind men who (for better or worse) changed film forever.Anyone who love cult or genre films knows Cannon. They were huge, especially in the 1980s, and made some of the finest action films out there. As this documentary shows, they were not afraid to use Chuck Norris to his fullest potential.I absolutely love all the behind-the-scenes tidbits on this. We see that Cannon never really knew what they were doing, but just kept going over the top and got lucky. The connection such figures as Michael Milliken is interesting, and it makes one wonder if some shady business was going down (apparently the SEC thought so).