 |
| It's over! |
Directed by: Mark Hartley
Produced by: Veronica Fury, Brett Ratner
Written by: Mark Hartley
Budget: I can't find any solid information concerning this documentary's budget.
Starring: Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus
Just because it's Bad Movie Month doesn't mean I have to exclusively watch bad movies. It also means I can watch movies about bad movies, and Electric Boogaloo is just that.
Were I to go back and redo my list of movies to watch this month, I would have included more Cannon films. When it comes to B-movie studios, Cannon ranks the highest on that particular ladder, and this documentary explains why in pretty good detail.
The Cannon Group started between Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey as a production studio which bought and produced the cheapest possible scripts they could find, with their budgets often limited to $300,000 per film. The vast majority of these were English versions of foreign-language softcore porn, with barely-there stories and lots of nudity. But as the 70s marched on the company started to flounder as lack of returns and tax wrangling serious hurt the company's financial strength.
So the two sold the company to a pair of Israeli film buffs, Manahem Golan and Yoran Globus, who essentially created the modern B-movie reputation.
Their business model consisted of buying the absolute cheapest scrips they could find, creating a poster for the as-yet-unfinished movie, and presenting it to potential investors. If the movie was purchased, they would knock it out in a few weeks as cheaply as possible and release it. This led to the creation of posters for a multitude of movies that never actually saw production, and often never left the script at all; however, it also gave rise to what was essentially a revival of a studio-system studio, where Cannon could control every aspect of the movie in-house.
Several of Cannon's big hits were from the 80s, including Enter the Ninja, Death Wish, Missing in Action, and the first Breakin'. Rather than let the mild successes go to their heads, Golan and Globus continued with their cheap production methods through the 80s, often producing over 40 films a year, which is absolutely insane. Many of these were over-hyped by the studio and seriously underperformed, but Golan had the ability to somehow convince people to continue funding his movies.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of the company and its practices), by the late 80s an early 90s Cannon's financial juggling caught up with the company and they were investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether Cannon misreported their finances. This, combined with a string of financial failures, including Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Captain America, and a failed attempt at a Spider-Man movie, Golan and Globus split and Cannon was gone, in all but name.
Electric Boogaloo is a look at The Cannon Group from people in the movie industry who worked with the two lead studio heads, including actors, writers, producers, and other production crew members. Overall it provides what seems to be a level, fair look at some of the practices, and doesn't shy away from the bad parts.
Sometimes with documentaries concerning people who are still active or alive you see either attempts to tear down the person's reputation or hail them as a champion of some particular vision. Electric Boogaloo doesn't seem to fall into either trap, and instead provides what seems to be a good representation of Globus and Golan as two guys who really like movies, who really wanted to make movies, and who made the best movies they could using their resources. Cannon definitely had some strange beginnings and people in the documentary don't shy away from calling the company out for its early exploitative nature.
But, the movie also doesn't shy away from the impact that Cannon had on the modern film landscape. The action movies we see today (the documentary points to Olympus Has Fallen as one example) are held up as simply Cannon movies with actual production value and care put into the scripts. It's something I hadn't considered before, but the point is presented that Cannon actually shaped the current action scene and movie, which I think has some merit.
One thing I would have liked to see from the documentary is actual interviews with Golan and Globus, but the movie addresses that at the end: the two were approached to appear in the documentary, but both declined...and several months before this movie was released, they produced their own documentary called The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a copy to watch, as I would have loved to compare the two, but such is life.
Again, if I were to do this again I would probably put some more Cannon movies onto the list. The biggest problems would be choosing which ones, and trying to make sure they wouldn't overshadow everything else. Maybe next time I'll just do a Cannon month, because there's certainly enough different movies to choose from.
Should You Watch It?
I think that, as a documentary, Electric Boogaloo accomplishes everything a good documentary should. It goes into the background, the current events, and gives a wide variety of opinions on how and why the subjects ticked. If you're into movies at all and would like to learn a little bit about the company that produced all those Chuck Norris VHSes, give this a shot.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment