Cannon Films, founded in 1967, was not an overnight success, although it co-produced some historically notable works, including Blood on Satan's Claw and The Sorcerers.
However, these are not the titles that come to mind when we hear the word "Cannon". Instead, we think of such low- fallutin' video store fodder as The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood (1980), Hospital Massacre (1981) and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984).
This incarnation of Cannon – the "real" Cannon – kicked off in 1979, when the company was sold for a song (well, €500,000) to Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Between churning out vehicles for the "Two Chucks" – Norris and Bronson – Golan and Globus would occasionally release a decent film, among them Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, John Cassavetes's Love Streams, and Godfrey Reggio's Powaqqatsi. But soon enough they'd be moving right along to another Death Wish sequel or some misbegotten sex romp starring either Sybil Danning, Brooke Shields, Sylvia Kristel or Bo Derek.
Golan and Globus were smart enough to make yearly splashes at Cannes, and for a while they owned the rights to Superman, Spider-Man and Captain America. Ironically, the cousins’ belief in superhero movies would hasten the production house’s demise.
True to their nickname, the "Go-Go Boys" would commission films with abandon, thereby creating some of cinema's oddest entities, most notably Jean Luc Godard's King Lear starring Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen. Screenplay? What screenplay?
Still, their “cheap as chips” ethos played well in Britain and Ireland in particular, where in-house Cannon stars such as Jean-Claude Van Damme proved to be box office draws.
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films brings together dozens of talking heads (plastic surgery, ahoy!) and the best clip reel you'll see this year. But where director Mark Hartley's previous documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, had Quentin Tarantino and Barry Humphries to walk viewers through the history of Ozploitation flicks, Boogaloo has far less star clout and depth.
Too often, the film plays like a common-garden best-of filler show. One half-expects some Z-lister to pop up and say: “And then there was the time Del Boy tried to put up the chandelier.”
It does not help that while Hartley had plenty of access to archive footage, the Go-Go Boys themselves declined to participate. (Golan subsequently died last August at the age of 85.) Inevitably, they were working on their own Electric Boogaloo- alike documentary. Plus ça change.
