Movie Info
Movie Name: Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films
Studio: Film Victoria
Genre(s): Documentary
Release Date(s): August 2, 2014
MPAA Rating: R
Who doesn’t like guys who dress like this?
Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus have dreams of making films that will take over the world…Enter: Cannon Films! With low budgets, gore, and nudity, Cannon made a name in the video industry with title after title. As Cannon grew bigger and bigger, the budgets also grew…but the income did not. The rise and fall of the company is revealed in glorious Cannon fashion!
Directed by Mark Hartley, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a documentary featuring interviews and film clips. The title is derived from the Cannon film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). The film was received with positive review upon its release.
Cannes Film Festival…synonymous with Chuck Norris.
As a kid growing up in the VCR boom of the early and mid-eighties, Cannon Films seemed to be everywhere. The video stores were loaded with movies where the Cannon logo popped up before a bad (often really bad) action movie kicked off. As a kid, it didn’t really matter. You were seeing action, nudity, and blood…and generally before you were allowed to in the theater. Seeing the rise and fall of Cannon was both nostalgic and a reminder of how bad many of the films really were.
The movie does a nice job showing how both Cannon became a success and how Cannon ultimately failed. The path of the Menahem and Yoram was pretty amazing considering how little effort they put into films and how much they really believed in them. The idea of cheap movies that could sell was ripe for VCRs and video store that needed both stock and lots of titles…you could get a Chuck Norris movie every week for a month and still have a new one. It was a genius concept.
Watching the movie indicates the only worthwhile Cannon film is Runaway Train
The documentary primarily tells the story through interviews but it really is a clip movie. It was fun to see some of the B-Actors I grew up with being interviewed, but the movie left me wanting more and more clips…and it provided. There were movies I vividly remembered seeing and movies that I wanted to see after Electric Boogaloo because they looked so bad (I think I’m going to have to check out The Apple).
Fans of ’80s films really should check out Electric Boogaloo. To clarify that, fans of bad ’80s films should be the real target. I don’t know that the movie has a huge mass appeal to those who didn’t grow up during the time or who spent their time with the big budget films of the ’80s. I can watch the film and enjoy it as someone who saw Masters of the Universe and Over the Top in the theater (and still feel dirty about it).
