Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus absolutely loved movies. It’s just too bad that, during their 1980s reign as owners of The Cannon Group, they had “cash registers where their hearts should be,” as disgruntled actress Laurene Landon puts it, just before she burns a VHS tape of America 3000, the forgotten flick she regrets making for them. Her anecdote represents the kind of filter-free candor that alights Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, Mark Hartley’s third (and reportedly final) documentary devoted to a specific branch of exploitation film.
Told with the same fervor flavor of his Not Quite Hollywood of 2008 and Machete Maidens Unleashed! two years later, Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo is a wondrous whirlwind tour of the chaos that erupted behind the B-movie label, birthing such releases as Breakin’, Bloodsport, Masters of the Universe, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Ninja III: The Domination and practically everything that decade in which Chuck Norris or Charles Bronson starred.
In general, those larger-than-life Cannon boys kept costs low, opened wide and, if they were lucky, clicked big with a ticket-buying public — a surefire formula until it suddenly wasn’t. Not coincidentally at the end of the ’80s, Golan and Globus bitterly parted ways; ever the dick-swinging showmen, the two then competed to beat the other to theaters with a movie about (of all things) the lambada dance craze. (Spoiler: Both opened the same day, to empty theaters.)
That “duel” is one of dozens of crazy, can’t-make-this-up stories shared by those Cannon alum who survived their time on various projects (and almost all of whom can do a killer Golan impression). We hear about the guys’ delusion that they were Oscar-bound with the Brooke Shields vehicle Sahara. That they stole private photos from Bo Derek’s bag, which they then issued as publicity stills for Bolero. That they accidentally cast Sharon Stone opposite Richard Chamberlain on King Solomon’s Mines because they thought they were getting Romancing the Stone’s Kathleen Turner. That their mid-movie replacement of a real orangutan with a fake one (a man in a suit) would go unnoticed — which it kinda did, since so few ever saw Going Bananas. That they made Michael Dudikoff a star with American Ninja because a super-vain Norris — not wanting his precious face obscured by ninja fabric — turned it down. There are tons more where those came from.
Supplemented with glorious clips, these tales arrive rapid-fire, ensuring Electric Boogaloo remains a live wire for its whole. Fast, loose and easy, the doc is over in less than two hours, yet so invigorating and engaging that I gladly would have sat for two more. —Rod Lott