Electric Boogaloo

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (18)

Australia/USA/Israel/UK 2014 106 mins Dir: Mark Hartley

Clyde the orangutan was hot shit in Hollywood after co-starring with Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can and Any Which Way But Loose. So Menahem Golan resolved to place the ape under contract to his maverick purveyors of B-movie schlock, Cannon Films. Clyde duly arrived at Menahem’s office with a platoon of Beverly Hills lawyers, whereupon the Cannon supremo proceeded to pitch Going Bananas – not to the suits but to the ape himself. Turning to his female head of publicity, he demanded: “Would you fuck this monkey?” Alas, Clyde left Cannon under a cloud after biting the film’s child lead and was replaced by a midget in an unconvincing chimp outfit.

Laugh-out-loud anecdotes like these are legion in Mark Hartley’s fast-paced, slickly-edited, affectionate account of the rise and fall of Cannon Films, which bestrode eighties cinema like a rather shonky, cut-price Colossus. Troubled Cannon had already churned out some trash by the time Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus showed up, including the forgotten hippiesploitation flick Joe and Swedish softcore romp Inga (Strapline: “Inga is coming”), which traded upon the assumption that films with subtitles were automatically art and their copious nudity therefore acceptable.

Under the duo who become known as the Go-Go Boys (or, according to one less charitable interviewee, Mayhem and Urine), the company churned out low-budget crap of every description and provided gainful employment for Chucks Norris and Bronson. In keeping with the chucking mud at walls principle, they’d be rewarded with a hit every so often, such as the breakdance cash-in Breakin’, which only served to encourage them. Menahem, who died last year, was the creative guy and chief huckster. He made up storylines on the spot and was skilled at selling movies that were neither cast nor written, existing only as lurid posters. A genuine cineaste, he craved respect but his frequently wayward money-making instincts usually triumphed over any vestigial artistic ones.

Richly illustrated with clips, Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed director Hartley’s film acknowledges that snobbery and not a little racism contributed to the vulgar cousins’ tarnished reputation. But it’s also true that these hustlers from Tel Aviv struggled to relate to American culture. Cannon’s dreadful musical The Apple (Menahem’s Tommy, apparently) is simply jaw-dropping in its awfulness. The Last American Virgin is probably the only film ever to feature an abortion scene cut to a U2 song. For reasons that nobody has ever been able to explain, when the young woman is recovering from this procedure her boyfriend shows up bearing gifts of a Christmas tree and a bag of oranges. And Cannon wasn’t above mixing up ninja, horror and, um, Flashdance-style hoofing genres in Ninja III: The Domination. “Menahem loved the intersection of ideas that should never meet each other,” observes a wry contributor.

His chutzpah was equally legendary. In casting House of the Long Shadows – which eventually brought together Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing – he announced that he wanted such horror greats as Karloff and Lugosi. Pity the poor lackey who had to explain that they were no longer available. On another occasion, he demanded “that Stone woman” for Cannon’s Poundstretcher Indiana Jones knock-off King Solomon’s Mines and was furious when he saw the finished film with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone. Turned out he meant Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone.

Most of the Cannon fodder relate these juicy anecdotes with laughter, and clearly still have affection for their old boss. Hartley also succeeds in getting some terrific quips out of them. “It was more like watching a man golf than act,” smirks Alex Winter of Charles Bronson’s performances in the many Death Wish sequels.

The dodgy financial shenanigans that eventually did for Cannon are rather glossed over; a faintly desperate case is made for thick-eared Chuck Norris flick Invasion USA being prescient in its depiction of a terrorist attack on the US; and the company’s one bona fide masterpiece, Andrei Konchalovsky’s magnificent Runaway Train, is duly celebrated. So it’s a shame that neither Cannon boss agreed to participate in Hartley’s film. That said, just about every interviewee feels the urge to do an impression of blustering Menahem, so it feels as though he’s in it anyway. After the duo’s partnership dissolved, they competed to be first to race their rival preposterous lambada dance craze flicks into cinemas, with the result that both flopped on the same day. Unsurprisingly, when they got wind of Hartley’s project, the duo reunited to commission their own authorised documentary, The Go-Go Boys. As a final caption reveals, they’d lost none of their skills in the quickie department: it beat Electric Boogaloo into cinemas by three months.