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. 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.Įlectric 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. “It resembles something you’ve seen, minus the good taste.” “That’s the Cannon way,” music supervisor Richard Kraft says of the pair’s approach to filmmaking. 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. 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. 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.ĭirector 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. The company was eventually brought down by its fast-and-loose approach to film production, and Cannon released its final film in 1993.

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.

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. 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.

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