Electric Boogaloo Documentary Review

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/electric-boogaloo-wild-untold-story-723050


Melbourne International Film Festival (Australian Showcase; Drafthouse Films)
With
Dolph Lundgren, Molly Ringwald, Tobe Hooper, Richard Chamberlin, Elliot Gould, Just Jaeckin, Franco Nero, Bo Derek, Franco Zeffirelli, Alex Winter, Michael Dudikoff, Robert Forster

Mark Hartley follows "Not Quite Hollywood" and "Machete Maidens Unleashed!" with this concluding entry in his exploitation trilogy, focusing on Israeli film cowboys Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.

Unlike the sanctioned version, The Go-Go Boys, which was made with the full cooperation of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the second documentary this year to examine their rise and fall, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, doesn't pull its punches. A zippy chronicle of the Israeli cousins' decade at play in the Hollywood sandbox, the documentary makes no bones about them bringing way more chutzpah than taste to their astonishingly prolific output. But even the gripes of collaborators whose careers were tarnished by the Golan-Globus touch can't dim the film's abiding affection for the nonpareil schlockmeisters.

Its largely disposable slate of horror, sex, cheap sci-fi and derivative action makes Cannon an obvious source of fascination for director Mark Hartley. This entry completes the trashtastic trilogy that the Australian exploitation aficionado began with his survey of homegrown genre flicks of the 1970s and '80s, Not Quite Hollywood, and continued by celebrating Filipino grindhouse grist in Machete Maidens Unleashed!
What made Not Quite Hollywood a blast was the insanely disparate body of work it covered, the common link being the Oz films' anything-goes ethos and the free-for-all of the period's relaxed national censorship laws. Electric Boogaloo takes in a similarly diverse genre panorama with the same rollicking approach. But while the countless clips sampled are often hilariously bad, the sheer tackiness of all but a relatively small handful of them becomes repetitive.
One of the more amusing talking heads, music supervisor Richard Kraft, likens the Cannon product pipeline to bowel movements dumped onto the international market with scant concern for quality or plot coherence: "You flush it. You make another one." The relentlessness of that cycle makes one wish Hartley had spent less time geeking out in a haze of fanboy enthusiasm and more time shaping the story of the Golan-Globus Hollywood odyssey.
He provides a cursory recap of Golan's grounding in the Israeli film industry, skipping any acknowledgment of his brief association with Roger Corman but mentioning such directorial nuggets as the 1968 Fiddler on the Roof knockoff, Tevye and His Seven Daughters.
That shameless tendency to pillage popular material intensified once Golan, the creative dreamer, teamed with his younger cousin Globus, the shrewd businessman, and the pair descended on Hollywood. Even before that, however, they discovered the commercial rewards of sensationalizing current events as screen fodder, via the Entebbe hostage crisis thriller Operation Thunderbolt; and depicting the sexploits of horny teens in Lemon Popsicle, which they later reworked Stateside as The Last American Virgin.
Some of the funniest excerpts detail Golan's penchant for creating Frankenstein's monster-type amalgams. Ninja III: The Domination married the fight action of Cannon's Enter the Ninja with the demonic chills of The Exorcist and the moves of Flashdance, casting Lucinda Dickey as an aerobics instructor by day, possessed instrument of vengeance by night. Sahara, featuring a wooden Brooke Shields, is described as Lawrence of Arabia meets Blue Lagoon meets The Great Race. Coverage of the making of 1984 hip-hop success Breakin' and the follow-up that lends this doc its title also yields lively insights.
The Cannon honchos blazed a trail for pop-cultural regurgitation and unnecessary sequels by jumping on every potential new franchise that landed on their desks, as well as revitalizing a few dead ones. A key example was the recruitment of Charles Bronson to follow Death Wish with a series of increasingly worthless sequels that gave Brit director Michael Winner license to indulge his worst excesses. Those Bronson shoot-'em-ups seem almost tame, however, compared to Winner's The Wicked Lady, a bawdy 1983 period romp in which Faye Dunaway sadistically whips a topless Marina Sirtis.
There's a common thread of actresses discovering that the nudity and sex requirements of a project were far more extensive than they had signed up for. This is typified by Bo Derek's account of making Bolero, a tawdry bid to cash in on her success in 10, though given that her husband John Derek directed, the Cannon guys can hardly take sole responsibility for that one.
Among industry insiders represented, Frank Yablans is particularly disparaging about the Cannon taint on MGM when the studio entered a distribution agreement with the Golan-Globus company. However, Yablans' comments might have benefited from some acknowledgment of his own role in the lion's demise. Of the filmmakers on hand to recall their time in the Cannon stable, Tobe Hooper and Boaz Davidson provide compelling input.
The Chuck Norris oeuvre gets ample coverage, though the actor himself is absent among interviewees, as are other heavy-hitters like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, whose unprecedented deal for north of $10 million to make the arm-wrestling grunt-a-thon Over the Top was the beginning of Golan's outsize ambitions getting the better of him. That downfall continued with debacles like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe, a failed Mattel toy vehicle captained by Dolph Lundgren in a resplendent mullet.
Several commentators suggest that the brash Golan-Globus style, their cheapskate operation and refusal to observe standard Hollywood etiquette caused them to remain unwelcome outsiders. Others insist it was simply a lack of taste and understanding of the American idiom that they were trying to emulate.
Hartley devotes some time to one of the best of the Cannon movies, Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, and almost as much to Barbet Schroeder's boozy downer Barfly. But the company's forays into artier waters with names like Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, Franco Zeffirelli, Norman Mailer and even Jean-Luc Godard aren't explored with enough depth to reveal whether it was a genuine bid for legitimacy or an occasional delusion.
More attention is given to the business model of selling off foreign rights via trade ads, posters or insta-pitches for thinly conceived movies, many of them never to be made. Golan and Globus were masters of this strategy, making them the kings of Cannes for a time. And while The Go-Go Boys is somewhat sketchy on the dwindling fortunes that forced the cousins to offload their British film industry holdings, that chapter along with allegations of irregular accounting practices is addressed here, albeit briefly.
Hartley gets around the absence of both Golan and Globus as active participants in the film by dipping heavily into archival interviews, most of them from a BBC special, The Last Moguls, and from a 60 Minutes segment.
There are plenty of colorful anecdotes. Soft-core porn purveyor Just Jaeckin muses that Golan had probably never opened a copy of the D.H. Lawrence novel when he packaged a coke- and booze-addled Sylvia Kristel in Lady Chatterley's Lover, while Richard Chamberlain reveals that Sharon Stone was cast opposite him by mistake in the Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff, King Solomon's Mines, and its sequel. Golan reportedly had asked for "that Stone woman," meaning Kathleen Turner, hot off Romancing the Stone. Perhaps the best tidbit is an account of Golan pitching a project directly to Clyde, the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose.
Hartley's film is consistently entertaining, if somewhat one-note. Where it could have been more satisfying is in coaxing the poignancy from this tale of two likeable interlopers, chasing Hollywood's version of the American Dream without ever being fully admitted to the club.
With: Dolph Lundgren, Molly Ringwald, Tobe Hooper, Richard Chamberlin, Elliot Gould, Just Jaeckin, Franco Nero, Bo Derek, Franco Zeffirelli, Alex Winter, Michael Dudikoff, Robert Forster, Catherine Mary Stewart, Olivia d'Abo, Marina Sirtis, Cassandra Peterson, Sybil Danning, Lucinda Dickey, John G. Avildson, Charles Matthau, Laurene Landon, Albert Pyun, Barbet Schroeder, Avi Lerner, Frank Yablans, Gary Goddard, Sam Firstenberg, Boaz Davidson, Jerry Schatzberg, Luigi Cozzi, Oliver Tobias, Edward R. Pressman, Stephen Tolkin, David Womack, Richard Kraft, Tom Luddy, Christopher Pearce
Production companies: Fury Productions, RatPac Documentary Films, XYZ Films
Director: Mark Hartley
Producers: Brett Ratner, Veronica Fury
Executive producers: Nate Bolotin, Todd Brown, Jeff Harrison, Hugh Marks, James Packer
Director of photography: Garry Richards
Editors: Mark Hartley, Sara Edwards, Jamie Blanks
Music: Jamie Blanks
Sales: Celluloid Dreams
No rating; 107 minutes.

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

www.craveonline.com/film/reviews/762027-fantastic-fest-2014-review-electric-boogaloo-wild-untold-story-cannon-films


Fantastic Fest 2014 Review: ‘Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films’




Mark Hartley’s documentary about the b-movie production company Cannon Films is fun but mean-spirited.

I could not have been more excited about Electric Boogaloo. Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed director Mark Hartley was finally profiling a series of films that related directly to me. It was fun learning about Osploitation and Philippino films, but Cannon Films made movies specifically aimed at me. Sometimes cheesy, often clichéd, but hardcore action movies. I even saw some of them in a theater!

Electric Boogaloo gets off to a breezy start, summarizing Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s Israeli films and early sexploitation simply as a way to lay down the background and get to the good stuff as quickly as possible. The documentary hits all the major Cannon films and any single title seems to be a source of fun anecdotes, so the whole movie is entertaining.

It just started to bother me that the tone of Electric Boogaloo seemed rather condescending towards Cannon. This is largely due to the subjects interviewed. They’re all disgruntled and look back at their work for Cannon with disdain. Sure, they were schlock films and Golan and Globus were hucksters, but is there nobody who actually loved Cannon films?

It’s not even a good natured, “Oh, Cannon.” You can tell some Cannon veterans harbor real ill will. In the case of Marina Sirtis, it’s rightful. She was actually abused on the set of two movies, so I’m not saying to let that go. In terms of behind the scenes talent, I get that real artists will lament seeing their own shoddy work, whether destroyed by bad editing and budget cuts or simply because they weren’t given the resources in the first place. It seems a little revisionist to chastise the gratuitous violence, particularly in the Death Wish sequels. If you had a problem with that, you had every right to stop working on those movies. At least after you saw how Death Wish II turned out, don’t act all indignant about Death Wish III. It’s too late to get judgmental. There’s a place for outrageous violence all in good fun, and those films seemed to deliver to a grateful audience at the time.

I guess I was looking for a Cannon nostalgia piece and there doesn’t seem to be any nostalgia. It’s an example of a failed enterprise, which is a valuable lesson. Some Cannon talent learned from Golan and Globus’s mistakes and went on to found more successful companies. It’s also a style of financing that doesn’t exist today. Films that presell foreign financing now tend to end up straight to video. Oh, to have been at Cannes when Golan and Globus were there. If only…

There are a number of major subjects speaking frankly about their films for Cannon. In addition to Sirtis, we see Bo Derek, Sybil Danning, Lucinda Dickey, Diane Franklin, Albert Pyun, Alex Winter, Dolph Lundgren and more. No Chuck Norris though, nor Globus nor the late Golan (who was still alive and approached for the film).

Hartley focuses on the most pivotal Cannon films: the Death Wish series, Breakin’, Missing in Action, Ninja series, Superman IV and Masters of the Universe. Key stories are told, like releasing the MIA sequel as part one and the original as a prequel. I knew those stories though, so I question the use of the word “Untold” in the subtitle. Other Cannon lore is left out, like the aborted plans to cobble together Superman V out of deleted scenes from IV, or the very idea of a Cannon’s Spider-Man. I guess you can’t tell every story, and those, while interesting, didn’t inform the rise and fall of Cannon. To give you some context, that means they made even worse decisions than failed comic book movies.

Coasting largely on the highlight reel of film clips and entertaining stories about Golan and Globus, Electric Boogaloo is fun to watch. If you’ve never heard of this era of ‘80s cinema before, I’m sure you’ll be picking out titles to Netflix. Hint: they’re not on Netflix, but many are available on iTunes. If you were already a fan and looking for the definitive Cannon Films film, that film may have gotten warped the way most Cannon films ended up. Yet, like actual Cannon movies, even the shortcomings of Electric Boogaloo are entertaining.

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

moveablefest.com/moveable_fest/2014/09/mark-hartley-electric-boogaloo-review.html



In what would ultimately be their final act as a producing duo due to Menahem Golan’s untimely passing this past August, the two men who created the ’80s action film juggernaut Cannon Films commissioned a documentary “The Go-Go Boys,” which premiered earlier this year at Cannes after learning Mark Hartley would be recounting their heyday in “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.” This actually becomes a cheeky footnote in “Boogaloo,” since after spending 105 minutes illustrating all the films that Golan and his cousin and business partner Yoram Globus made as a response to other, more handsomely produced films in the marketplace, the irony is hardly lost on Hartley. What isn’t said in that end title card, though is alluded to by interviewees throughout Hartley’s film, is how Golan and Globus often didn’t understand what the movies they’d so readily rip off were actually about, which makes “Electric Boogaloo” an even more fitting tribute to the Israeli moguls since one can’t imagine a more loving, entertaining portrait of their crazy adventures in the film business.

Naturally, Golan and Globus didn’t make themselves available to their competitor – a “60 Minutes” segment proves invaluable to giving the two a voice in the film. Nor for that matter did many of the stars who the two helped create such as Jean Claude Van Damme or Chuck Norris, but “Electric Boogaloo” once again displays the “Not Quite Hollywood” director’s secret weapon – the below-the-line talent, who unencumbered by celebrity status, feel free to share the berserk anecdotes imaginable about the duo. Sure, Elliott Gould, Bo Derek and Richard Chamberlain show up to describe the skirmishes they had with Golan and Globus (or in Chamberlain’s case, “Allan Quartermain” co-star Sharon Stone), but perhaps no film other than Wendy Apple’s 2004 doc “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing” has featured so many editors in front of the camera such as Alain Jakubowicz, Mark Goldblatt and Mark Helfrich recalling the often bizarre and byzantine nature of Cannon productions, which were usually made on the fly (“Breakin” went from conception to completion in a mere three weeks) and as one interviewee describes of “the Cannon Way,” always “resembled something minus good taste.”

Hartley gleefully races through the company’s rise initially on the back of softcore porn in Israel, then the “Death Wish” and “Delta Force” series once making a name for themselves in America before the company went in search of respectability with such directors as John Cassavetes and Norman Mailer and ultimately burst at the seams when their ambition finally exceeded their reach. No less than Tobe Hooper and Franco Zeffirelli attest that the two were the best producers they ever worked for and Golan and Globus’ passion for show business – in all aspects – would only seem to be outpaced by the exuberance with which Hartley jumps between cleverly curated clips of action, T & A and whatever you’d call Golan’s musical “The Apple” and the eager participants he interviews.

There does, however, seem to be some slight fatigue on Hartley’s part, already having made the move to narrative features with “Patrick” last year and his introductory remarks at the Toronto Film Fest saying that “Electric Boogaloo” was pushed forward by the fans sounding less like a celebratory call to arms than an admission of obligation after such comprehensive histories of Aussie and Filipino exploitation flicks. It isn’t a bad thing Hartley’s main concern is with having a good time, but there seems to be less attention to detail when it comes to the overall structure of “Electric Boogaloo,” which has an emphasis on individual films that somewhat diminishes Golan/Globus’ real large-scale achievements – in pioneering the concept of pre-selling foreign territories based on what stars were attached to their films – as well as their parting on less than amiable terms. An indistinct timeline causes additional confusion. Still, if this is Hartley’s last documentary for a while, he’s going out with a bang, and of course, the film’s subjects wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next play at Fantastic Fest in Austin on Sept. 23rd at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar at 11:25 a.m.

[The Ultimate Nullifier]

www.denofgeek.com/movies/electric-boogaloo/32286/electric-boogaloo-review

he rise and fall of Cannon Films is told in Mark Hartley's wildly entertaining documentary, Electric Boogaloo. Here's Ryan's review...

Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were famous (or infamous) for many things, but a stringent approach to quality filmmaking was hardly one of them. At the height of their success in the 1980s, the Israeli cousins, and their company Cannon Films, were synonymous with cheap B-movies of just about every kind: Chuck Norris action flicks, sex comedies, ninja martial arts epics, dance movies and tawdry slasher horrors.

Their films frequently horrified critics, but became a staple of video rental stores: with Cannon Films cranking out as many as 50 or so pictures a year at its peak, the company's distinctive logo and self-explanatory film titles (New Year's Evil, Avenging Force, Enter The Ninja) were ubiquitous throughout the 80s and early 90s. The company was eventually brought down by its fast-and-loose approach to film production, and Cannon released its final film in 1993. But the studio left behind a colossal back catalogue of movies, and, as the feature-length documentary Electric Boogaloo proves, an awful lot of extraordinary anecdotes.

Director Mark Hartley's love of B-movies previously fuelled the feature-length documentaries Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), and Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films offers a similarly affectionate portrait. It charts Golan and Globus' journey from Israel - where the pair scored an early critical and financial hit with 1977's Operation Thunderbolt - to their adventures in America, which began with the purchase of an ailing production company called Cannon Films in 1979. That acquisition happened to tie in to the boom years of the VHS tape, and Cannon Films was perfectly placed to cater to a growing B-movie market.

In Electric Boogaloo, a variety of actors, producers, directors, screenwriters and technicians talk about their memories of working with Golan and Globus, resulting in a colourful, frequently hilarious oral history of two highly unorthodox producers. While Globus was the quieter of the two, diligently raising finances and securing deals in the shadows, Golan was the bullish, fiercely energetic figurehead, frequently making up movie ideas on the spot or cheerfully recycling old ones.

"That's the Cannon way," music supervisor Richard Kraft says of the pair's approach to filmmaking. "It resembles something you've seen, minus the good taste."

That lack of taste can be found in the movie clips that flash up in between anecdotes: the assorted beatings, blood-lettings and bad prosthetic effects in Enter The Ninja, the acres of flesh on display in Cannon's one-of-a-kind adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover (made to cash in on the post-Emmanuelle success of Sylvia Kristel), and Golan's utterly bizarre musical The Apple, which he thought would be a hit on a par with Tommy, but instead resulted in preview audiences throwing their complimentary soundtrack LPs at the cinema screen.

Electric Boogaloo moves at a break-neck pace through these clips and personal stories, aptly mimicking the studio's own fast-and-loose approach to making movies. Not everyone has fond memories of their experiences on Cannon's output - Alex Winter's recollections of working with Michael Winner on Death Wish 3 are less than rose-tinted - while others appear to look back on the period with disbelief. Frank Yablans, who was the head of MGM in the early 1980s, still doesn't seem to have recovered from the string of iffy films that resulted from the brief distribution deal Cannon had with his studio at the time.

Just about everyone can agree on one thing, though: that Menahem Golan carried with him a real passion for cinema, if not the discipline or attention span to ensure the quality of what resulted. Not that everything Cannon produced was pure schlock: as one interviewee notes, Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train was a superb thriller, while no less a filmmaker than Franco Zeffirelli maintains that Otello, produced by Golan and Globus, was the best movie he ever made. But the sheer number of projects the company had on the go at any one time meant that its output was wildly uneven, to say the least - according to one anecdote, Golan would often get one movie muddled up with another, or forget that he'd greenlit a film entirely.

One story goes that, when it came to casting the female co-star for King Solomon's Mines (a film rushed into production to capitalise on the success of Indiana Jones), Golan blithely said, "Hire that Stone girl." It was assumed that Golan was referring to Sharon Stone, a little-known actress who'd previously appeared in things like Irreconcilable Differences and Magnum P.I. The actress Golan was actually referring to was Kathleen Turner, the co-star of Romancing The Stone. Too late: Sharon Stone was cast and the film was hurriedly shot. It was only when a rough cut was screened for the producers that Golan turned around and said words to the effect of, "Who the hell is she?"

It's but one of dozens of delicious, almost too-good-to-be-true stories in Electric Boogaloo. Others range from tales of questionable yet quite clever business tactics, pre-selling movies on the strength of little more than a poster or a title to overseas investors, the rivalry between Cannon's Breakin' and Orion Pictures' Beat Street to become the first hip-hop culture movie, and the rush to release a sequel with one of the most infamous titles in history: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Molly Ringwald, Richard Chamberlain and Dolph Lundgren are among the starry contributors, but the best anecdotes come from the various film directors and technicians who had to deal with Cannon's chaotic methods on an almost daily basis. The story about an attempt to make a family movie about a chimpanzee - what would eventually become 1987's Going Bananas - is absolutely priceless.

Ultimately, 1987 would mark the beginning of the end for Cannon Films, as its desire to break into blockbuster territory with (relatively) expensive movies like Superman IV and Masters Of The Universe coincided with its impending bankruptcy. But even as those films failed to draw in the business Cannon so desperately needed, its place in moviemaking history was already assured. No other company was making films quite like them at the time, and some of their tactics - like courting overseas markets - would be adopted by other studios before too long.

Most of all, though, Cannon left behind a collection of films that were, for better or worse, unique. Electric Boogaloo captures the opportunism, tackiness and sheer energy of the studio's 80s output, and the result is a relentlessly absorbing, lovingly crafted document from the era that taste forgot.

Electric Boogaloo will be screening at the London Film Festival on the 9th and 11th of October.