Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Srory of Cannon Films (15.)
Directed by Mark Hartley. Featuring a heap of people. 107 mins.
The combination of Mark Hartley and the story of Cannon pictures should be a perfect match. Hartley has made a career out of films celebrating trashy, exploitation cinema, most notable his deliriously entertaining Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Cannon films was the Icarus of trash movies. After dominating Israeli cinema, two cousins Menahem Golam and Yoram Globus moved to LA in the eighties to crack America and began churning out quick, low budget features. By the middle of the eighties they were one of the biggest forces in the cinema world but blew it all by paying Sylvester Stallone $12 million for an arm-wrestling film and making a cheapskate Superman IV.
The film even has a perfect title: Electric Boogaloo being the post hyphen part of the title to the sequel to their crucial early hit Breakdance. How could this not add up to a good time? Well, for a supposedly lighthearted nostalgic schlock romp, there is a lot of venom, hatred and contempt in this film. Hartley has interviewed a bewildering array of former colleague and performers and almost nobody has a good word for them. Occasionally they'll guffaw nostalgically about their unorthodox ways: Golem's habit of making up ideas on the hoof, inventing a title, knocking up a poster, flogging the overseas distribution rights and then, maybe, getting round to making the film. Mostly though it's all hatred. They cut corners, paid peanuts and didn't care about people's safety. Above all they made really, really bad films. Not so-bad-their-fun bad films, so bad you can't watch them bad. Often nasty too. Really nasty. Michael Winner nasty. A highlight of the film is Alex Winter's (Bill to Keanu's Ted) character assassination of Michael Winter. One insight you can take from the film is that mainstream films are way less violent than they were in the seventies and eighties.
The most perplexing thing about is that both of them loved movies; making them motivated them more than making money. They were film snobs too: desperate for Oscars and Yes Sir, No Sir, Three Bags Full Sir to any down on his luck big name director who still had some attachemnet to his reputation and came to them for money.
There are some interesting anecdotes and insights but I found my interest flagging. A feature of the Cannon story would be frantic races against the clock to turn out a film cashing in on a new fad, before someone else's film cashing in on a fad. How appropriate then that this film has been beaten to the screen by Golam and Globus's own version, The Go Go Boys. Unusually though, I think theirs may be the better film
Directed by Mark Hartley. Featuring a heap of people. 107 mins.
The combination of Mark Hartley and the story of Cannon pictures should be a perfect match. Hartley has made a career out of films celebrating trashy, exploitation cinema, most notable his deliriously entertaining Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Cannon films was the Icarus of trash movies. After dominating Israeli cinema, two cousins Menahem Golam and Yoram Globus moved to LA in the eighties to crack America and began churning out quick, low budget features. By the middle of the eighties they were one of the biggest forces in the cinema world but blew it all by paying Sylvester Stallone $12 million for an arm-wrestling film and making a cheapskate Superman IV.
The film even has a perfect title: Electric Boogaloo being the post hyphen part of the title to the sequel to their crucial early hit Breakdance. How could this not add up to a good time? Well, for a supposedly lighthearted nostalgic schlock romp, there is a lot of venom, hatred and contempt in this film. Hartley has interviewed a bewildering array of former colleague and performers and almost nobody has a good word for them. Occasionally they'll guffaw nostalgically about their unorthodox ways: Golem's habit of making up ideas on the hoof, inventing a title, knocking up a poster, flogging the overseas distribution rights and then, maybe, getting round to making the film. Mostly though it's all hatred. They cut corners, paid peanuts and didn't care about people's safety. Above all they made really, really bad films. Not so-bad-their-fun bad films, so bad you can't watch them bad. Often nasty too. Really nasty. Michael Winner nasty. A highlight of the film is Alex Winter's (Bill to Keanu's Ted) character assassination of Michael Winter. One insight you can take from the film is that mainstream films are way less violent than they were in the seventies and eighties.
The most perplexing thing about is that both of them loved movies; making them motivated them more than making money. They were film snobs too: desperate for Oscars and Yes Sir, No Sir, Three Bags Full Sir to any down on his luck big name director who still had some attachemnet to his reputation and came to them for money.
There are some interesting anecdotes and insights but I found my interest flagging. A feature of the Cannon story would be frantic races against the clock to turn out a film cashing in on a new fad, before someone else's film cashing in on a fad. How appropriate then that this film has been beaten to the screen by Golam and Globus's own version, The Go Go Boys. Unusually though, I think theirs may be the better film
