This fascinating, equal parts inspirational and cautionary tale might rival Macbeth in its portrayal of the cost of ambition – and for this writer, plus many other British readers who were around in the 1980s, there’s a curiously personal element given how that ambition had rather significant consequences in the UK. The matter only comes up briefly in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, but Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s company were very significant figures in the British film industry after buying Thorn EMI in 1986, which included their studios, their film and video labels, and the ABC cinema chain. I grew up in Hull, where the biggest cinema was the ABC Regal on Ferensway, and as such many of my earliest film-going memories involve that unmistakable hexagonal logo hurtling off the screen toward me. Though I didn’t know it at the time, the ABC Regal was something of a historic venue, for as well as being a cinema, once upon a time it had also hosted live music; The Beatles and Rolling Stones played there, and my mother had been in the audience for The Small Faces. However, by summer 1989 – around the time things really began to sour for Cannon Films – the ABC closed its doors for good, and stood dormant and crumbling for fifteen years before it was finally torn down to make way for the St Stephens retail complex, resulting in a Hull city centre which (pardon me going all old-mannish) is almost unrecognisable from the one I knew.
This, for me, makes Electric Boogaloo a very curious experience; to see how the empire-building ways of two men wound up having a very real impact on the city I grew up in, and indeed the whole British film industry. I’m reminded in many ways of watching Jake West’s Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape for the first time: on the one hand, it seems easy to look back on such tales of the 1980s and laugh contentedly, secure in the belief that no such shenanigans could possibly happen again now; but on the other hand, one doesn’t have to look too closely at the news to see that such things are not so different from the 1980s now, in the worst ways. Golan and Globus embody that 1980s spirit in a great many ways, and while the temptation may be there to just point and laugh, we must also recognise the very real impact the actions of such powerful individuals can have when they place productivity not only over quality, but also wind up spending way more than they’re earning.
This is not to suggest, however, that Mark Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo is by any means an all-out attack on Golan and Globus; far from it. Much as in Hartley’s previous documentaries Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, the Cannon story is treated with a blend of incredulity and awe, its detached, critical eye milking every drop of humour out of the madcap chronicle and finding as much to admire as to deride about the ambitious Israeli producers. While they may have been deemed a bad joke by the film industry, it’s clear that in their own way Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were entirely serious about what they did, and while they were shameless in their commercialism they seem to have been entirely sincere in their love of cinema. There are innumerable anecdotes about Golan (also a director himself) which convey a sense of him having been a deluded buffoon, an Ed-Wood-got-lucky (up to a point); and yet, one quote direct from the man himself, in which he describes the love of cinema as rooted in the pursuit of more life, strikes me as very true and even quite lyrical. Then there’s the fact that Franco Zefferelli, not a name one typically associates with exploitation, calls Golan and Globus the best producers he ever worked with, and the film they produced for him – Othello – as the best he ever made.
The documentary comes with the rather hilarious footnote that, when asked to participate in the documentary (Golan was still with us when it went into production), the producers refused and instead fast-tracked their own documentary on the history of Cannon, The Go-Go Boys, which made it to screens first. Small wonder they’d decline involvement, as a great many of the accounts given by those who worked with them range from the mocking to the scathing: Martine Beswick, who didn’t have the best experience on The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, recounts nicknaming them Mayhem and Urine. Bo Derek recalls photographs being stolen from her bags and used in advertising without her being in any way consulted, there is mention of Golan wielding an uzi in order to get his shot, and plenty more examples given of their ruthlessness. As an offshoot of this, we have something of a subplot (is it appropriate to speak of those in documentaries? I’m not sure, but it seems the best description) about how their collaborator Michael Winner, who directed Death Wish 2&3 and The Wicked Lady for Cannon, was more than a match for them in the fanaticism stakes; Death Wish 3 stars Alex Winter and Marina Sirtis (there’s an image that never leaves you, Bill S Preston Esq. participating in the rape and murder of Deanna Troi) speak in fairly aghast tones of the late director’s megalomania and sadism, leaving one thinking Winner might make quite the subject for a documentary in his own right.
Cannon may have burned themselves out as soon as they rose to prominence, but it certainly isn’t hard to see the spirit of Golan and Globus alive and well today: take the gloriously cartoonish, high-octane low-logic spectacle of this year’s billion dollar blockbuster Fast & Furious 7, and Vin Diesel proclaiming – apparently in all seriousness – that it should win the best picture Oscar. Hartley has produced another energetic documentary that’s as amusing as it is informative, and – as most other reviews have remarked – as fast-paced and entertaining as any Cannon schlockbuster. And that’s hardly surprising, given most of the footage taken from the films themselves are the money shots: all the blood, nudity, explosions and so forth. Modern filmmakers might not want to use Cannon as a model for how to successfully build and maintain a filmmaking enterprise, but they sure did give us some great midnight movie entertainment. And in common with Mark Hartley’s previous documentaries, Electric Boogaloo both prompts nostalgia for the films you already know (the Breakin’ movies and Masters of the Universe in particular were firm childhood favourites of mine), and also leaves you with a long list of previously unseen films you’re suddenly anxious to track down. I for one will not be able to rest until I’ve managed to see Ninja 3: the Domination; really, who wouldn’t want to see a movie described as a combination of a ninja movie, The Exorcist and Flashdance?
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is out on Region 2 DVD on 13th July, from Metrodome.