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Mark Hartley, the man behind the wildly entertaining documentaries about B-grade films and filmmakers, Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed (2010), premiered his latest and, sadly, last documentary - Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films - in the opening weekend of the 2014 Melbourne International Festival (MIFF).

As with Hartley's previous documentaries, the story at the heart of Electric Boogaloo (its name taken from the film, "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo", the strange sequel to the hit 1984 rap dancing film, "Breakin'") cleverly unfolds through the skillful editing together of myriad eyewitness talking heads and interspersing these with clips from relevant films along with some wonderfully tongue-in-cheek animations. Essentially, Hartley's latest film explores the story behind Cannon films from its inception to its ultimate demise, following the weird and wild careers of crazy Israeli cinephiles-cum-directors-cum-producers-cum-Hollywood B-grade movie moguls, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Theirs is an extraordinary rags-to-riches- rags story and one well worth seeing for yourself. Hartley has a rare gift for storytelling in his documentaries, bringing together a complex panoply of opinions, rants, scathing criticism and fond remembrances, and weaving these all together into a taut, laugh-out-loud, highly entertaining film, and Electric Boogaloo is no exception, as demonstrated by the very enthusiastic reception the film received from the audience at MIFF.

For film lovers and those who grew up with the Golan/Globus catalog in the 1980s with films like Missing in Action, Lifeforce, Treasure of the Four Crowns, American Ninja, Break Dance, Death Wish 2 and its sequels, Masters of the Universe, The Last American Virgin, Cyborg, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ... the list goes on, and on, and on ... this film is pure joy and something of a nostalgia trip. In this regard the film does have a sad side as it follows how the dreams of Golan and Globus would eventually fizzle up in bankruptcy and acrimony, leaving behind a library of impossibly bizarre creations that are truly weird and wonderful. Electric Boogaloo will no doubt prompt you to want to revisit many of these titles or discover others for the first time. I suspect that, being a true lover of B movies, this is ultimately one of Hartley's aims.

...Answer: The Cannon Group! Started in Israel by Manahem Golan and his cousin, Yoram Globus, in the 1970s, with Golan being the more flamboyant creative force and Globus being more of the practical money man, they churned out schlock movies for about 14 years, about ten of those being in the United States for a global market. They were all about rushed scripts including Manahem making up scripts as he filmed, getting one or maybe two big names that maybe had seen better days to draw in audiences, lots of violence, bad special effects, and lots of sex and nudity. I always wondered where those trashy movies that Showtime would show late at night thirty years ago came from, and this documentary answered that question for me. The documentary moves at a rapid pace, with some of the stars that were in the films that have a good sense of humor about the whole thing such as Catherine Mary Stewart (The Apple) and Diane Franklin (The Last American Virgin) telling their stories.

Actually the documentary is a bit of a morality tale about the excesses of the 80's which pretty much overlays the time that the Cannon Group was based in the United States. Cannon Group was doing okay, even if they were making bad movies, until Michael Milken came along (remember, the guy who went to jail for what looks quaint compared to what the banksters did to tank the entire American economy 20 years later?) and managed to raise 300 million dollars for them. Accustomed to making films for just a few million dollars, sometimes less than a million, Cannon Group suddenly went on a spend and expand fest that ultimately brought them to bankruptcy. In the end they were filming and owned theater chains all over the world, and the colossal size of their failures brought them down almost exactly as the 90s began, after the cousins fought and split up and made competing films about the same dance - The Lambada - that opened the same day at the same theater in Los Angeles in 1990. Both films flopped.

Just the shear number of stories is astounding - how the cousins heading Cannon Group wound up making the Alan Quartermain movies with an actress they didn't even want because they confused Sharon Stone with "Romancing the Stone" - they actually wanted Kathleen Turner, how MGM, desperate for some product actually distributed Cannon's films for two years and, in the end, would rather sell out to Ted Turner than keep putting out such tripe, Bo Derek on the hilarious dialogue of "Bolero", and a pretty good director, Franco Zeffirelli, saying that he didn't know how to top himself after he made "Otello" for Cannon and how Manahem Golan was the only producer he'd ever met who truly understood the entire process of filmmaking and had absolutely nothing but praise for Cannon Group!

There have been many small film companies come and go, many from the Depression era in which everybody involved is dead, and their stories are probably are not nearly as interesting as this one. Watch this for the weirdness of it all and - if you are old enough - the nostalgia. One thing you can say about Cannon and the cousins that headed it - they had a willingness to take a risk that is entirely missing from filmmakers and especially their backers today. In fact, if character Max Bialystock from Mel Brooks' "The Producers" had been involved in film rather than the theater, and had been on the level and not an embezzler, he would have BEEN the colorful Manahem Golan, in my humble opinion. Highly recommended if you are interested in more recent film history.

I remember pretty clearly the Cannon Films logo and its distinctive loud crashing sound accompaniment that introduced so many films I watched on video in my teenage years in the 80's. I never really thought too much about it until now, having seen this wildly entertaining documentary about these B movie mavericks. A few years ago I saw another similarly fun documentary about specific genre films, Machete Maidens Unleashed, a film also helmed by the same director Mark Hartley. Well, he sure has a knack for these things because this one follows a pretty similar template where we get to hear anecdotes from a large selection of people who were involved in the making of these flicks and, better still, many clips from a wide ranging assortment of the crazy, fun and stupid movies that Cannon became famous for. They were run by two Israelis Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (neither of whom appeared in the documentary deciding in true Cannon style to make their own documentary on the subject simultaneously).

Their main decade was the 80's where they unleashed a huge number of low budget movies from horror to sexploitation to action and dance movies plus a whole lot in between. They were mainly known to be purveyors of schlock entertainment and with good reason as, despite releasing some acclaimed films and working with some important directors such as John Cassavetes and Jean Luc Godard, they were in the main responsible for straight-ahead genre pictures. Their films have a refreshing absence of any political correctness whatsoever and often feature copious amounts of nudity and violence, quite often at the same time as in the case of some notorious films in their catalogue such as Death Wish II (1982). Other times they featured laughably bad special effects like can be seen in Hercules (1983), some were blatant bandwagon jumpers like the hip hop dance film Breakin' (1984), they also released the notoriously sexy Bo Derek vehicle Bolero (1984) which so outraged MGM who had set up a distribution deal with them, they released the very silly sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), while some of their output simply defies description like the extremely strange and silly musical The Apple (1980). They made many Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris vehicles; they discovered Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren and gave a platform for cult directors like Tobe Hooper to make movies. Things only started to go wrong in 1987 when they began to over-reach themselves and spent multi-millions on three box office disasters - the Sylvester Stallone film Over the Top which was about...arm wrestling; the superhero movie Superman IV: The Quest for Peace which was very expensive for them but not expensive enough to execute good enough special effects resulting in a laughable film; and finally Masters of the Universe, a film based on the popular 80's toys. So there is a dramatic story arc to this, which helps it function as a narrative but in the main it works so well simply because it is chock-full of entertaining clips from an array of movies and has some funny observations from the people involved. For any B movie lover this really is a must. And what's more, you are guaranteed to be led to seek out a few new flicks off the back of it.

Fairly interesting documentary charts the rise and fall of The Cannon Group, a company made popular by two Israeli cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. For the most part, they didn't exactly make prestige films, but they did an uncanny job of cranking out scores of B pictures that were often quite entertaining, no matter if the level of quality wasn't the highest. After a number of years, they did leave an impression on the film industry, if only for their impressive knack for "pre-selling" movies, using no more than posters, titles, and concepts.

This reasonably entertaining production is from Mark Hartley, who's left his own indelible stamp on the industry by making these kinds of films; previously, he'd done documentaries on the cult and exploitation pictures of both Australia ("Not Quite Hollywood") and the Philippines ("Machete Maidens Unleashed"). Instead of having a narrator to sort of take us step by step through this tale, a series of sit down interviews play in quick succession, with various cast and crew of numerous Cannon efforts giving their thoughts on the movies that they made. Some of the interviews are quite engaging; people interviewed include Franco Nero, Sybil Danning, Laurene Landon (it's actually rather distressing seeing her mime setting fire to a copy of "America 3000"), Boaz Davidson, David Engelbach, Christopher Pearce, Richard Edlund, Tobe Hooper, Greydon Clark, Alex Winter, and others.

After "Electric Boogaloo" is over, one does feel that they've gotten a pretty vivid, "warts and all" picture of the Golan & Globus personalities. Golan was the real character: volatile, demanding, opinionated. Globus was the somewhat more restrained of the two, the one who handled more business oriented duties. Ultimately, their hubris caught up with them. Although they could on occasion produce something truly special ("Runaway Train"), they simply ended up getting too ambitious, and getting in over their heads.

Many of the interviewees do seem to hold Cannon product in quite a bit of contempt, which is unfortunate, because while much of it may not be Oscar baiting material, it was, most of the time, a good deal of fun. If you're like this viewer, The Cannon Group has given you many hours of viewing pleasure with their B grade action movies, thrillers, sci-fi, and horror features.

In the end, it's quite telling that Golan & Globus declined to participate in this documentary, instead beating it to the punch with their OWN non fiction feature titled "The Go Go Boys".

Seven out of 10.

The name Cannon Films is an evocative one, bringing to mind synonyms like schlock and cut-rate, and it's a well-earned reputation for cheapness. The story of two Israeli guys with a passion for making movies is a noble one, although their questionable business decisions tend to undercut that enthusiasm. Still, their rise and fall make for interesting documentary material, and that's part of what makes "Electric Boogaloo" so good.

The other reason is the testimonial side of things. Rounded up before the camera are a wide-ranging group of people that have had dealings with the studio, and each and every one of them is eager to opine on such a reckless outfit. I can only wonder what venom Christopher Reeves would have in store were he still us today, and I would like to have heard Stallone's views after "Over the Top" (good or bad, can't tell). Chuck Norris is a glaring omission, given his 5-picture deal with them . . . or is he merely content with how it all turned out? But there's the ever-charming Catherine Mary Stewart and the surprisingly mocking Alex Winter offering their input, and both are amusing. There's a lot involved in this; it's really a varied roster.

This is a hugely entertaining movie that moves at a brisk pace and is funny throughout. A lot easier to sit through than most of Cannon's movie's, that's for sure.

Highly recommended.

8/10

For those of us that grew up in the VHS age of the 1980's, Cannon Films was a studio that provided us with much of our movie watching excitement. New Year's Evil (1980), Enter the Ninja (1981), Invasion U.S.A. (1985) and Cobra (1986) are just a few of the titles that helped propel Cannon Films in its heyday and is the focus of the new documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus bought Cannon films for $500,000 in 1979 and created a film sausage factory where films were fast tracked to the screen based on high risk concepts or eye-catching movie posters ("At Cannon, 52 pictures a year wasn't enough").

Immediately, the two relatives saw a market for B-movie action films and started to build their empire on the backs of such franchises as Death Wish and various Chuck Norris vehicles such as Delta Force and the Missing in Action series.

Director Mark Hartley is no stranger to documenting film on film. Harley directed Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation in 2008 and Machete Maidens Unleashed! in 2010. Hartley has a formula that works when exploring niche genres in film and stays the course with Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

Clips of films (everything from American Ninja, Texas Chainsaw Massacre II and Bloodsport are intertwined with interviews from familiar faces such as Molly Ringwald, Alex Winter, Dolph Lundgren and Richard Chamberlain. The doc takes us back to the early 80's and Hartley covers as many bases as possible when docu-reminiscing through such mindless yet wildly entertaining films that shaped many of our youths.

For a walk down memory lane, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is one hell of a fun ride. But it's a safe ride and one that doesn't give us any real deep deep deep insight into anything and just skims the surface of historical reference. When Electric Boogaloo does try and dive beyond an E: True Hollywood Story expose (such as a bit on diva Sharon Stone) it is met with a shrug of the shoulders and a 'Yea, not surprised' reaction from a target audience that was much more appreciative when the film simply highlighted films that we thought were even greater than the invention of sliced bread.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a tad overlong at 105 minutes but breathes new life into their decaying body with every newly introduced film that sparks memories of an age long gone. We do get educated on how now more popular directors got their start (Jean-Luc Godard with King Lear, Barbet Schroder with Barfly and John Cassavetes with Love Streams) with Cannon much like Roger Corman started the careers of Ron Howard, Martin Scorcese and James Cameron. And it was interesting to see the downfall of the company with big budget backed busts such as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe.

Menahem Golan (who recently passed away in August 2014) and Yoram Globus did not participate in the documentary so any opinion of their business practices are told by the many interviewed stars and staff that were involved in their pictures including Cassandra Peterson (Elvira), Bo Derek, Michael Dudikoff and Elliot Gould.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films felt formulaic. It went through the motions and tired harder to tap into our memories than it did trying to tap into the backlots and secrets surrounding the studio (after all, it is titled 'The Wild, Untold Story'). Still, for someone who has seen every one of the films that was displayed on screen – and some, multiple times - Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films was like putting on your favorite pair of shoes that have long outlived their usage date. It had me reaching into my VHS collection to re-screen films I have not paid attention to in decades. And for that, Mark Hartley deserves credit.

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A one-of-a-kind story about two-of-a-kind men who (for better or worse) changed film forever.

Anyone who love cult or genre films knows Cannon. They were huge, especially in the 1980s, and made some of the finest action films out there. As this documentary shows, they were not afraid to use Chuck Norris to his fullest potential.

I absolutely love all the behind-the-scenes tidbits on this. We see that Cannon never really knew what they were doing, but just kept going over the top and got lucky. The connection such figures as Michael Milliken is interesting, and it makes one wonder if some shady business was going down (apparently the SEC thought so).

Informative and enjoyable documentary about the rise and fall of Cannon Films, a beloved part of my youth. Cannon made many cheesy and low-brow movies and this doc covers most of them and, yes, insults them...a lot. I admit as a Cannon fan it bristled a bit at first but I know that their films were, more often than not, trash. But they were also, more often than not, entertaining trash. The tone of the documentary is lighthearted, with many people sharing their funny anecdotes about the crazy antics of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (particularly Golan). There are some nasty jabs here and there, with the Most Sour award going to former MGM exec Frank Yablans, who pulled no punches in what he thought of Cannon's output (Mr. Yablans passed away shortly after this was released). Most of the talking heads are behind-the-scenes types but there are many actors and directors also interviewed, including Molly Ringwald, Catherine Mary Stewart, Alex Winter, Franco Nero, Dolph Lundgren, Richard Chamberlain, Franco Zeffirelli, and Sybil Danning. Not a lot of time is spent on many of my favorite Cannon movies but that's to be expected given the amount of films they had to cover in the time they had. They did an admirable job of covering the major Cannon films and they told the story of Golan-Globus well. The ample use of film clips is appreciated, as is the brisk pace. I think it's something every Cannon fan should see, although be warned if you're sensitive or protective about their films you may be put off by some of it, such as "Bill S. Preston, Esquire" acting as though he has a leg to stand on commenting on Charles Bronson's acting ability. Minor annoyances aside, it's a fun look back at Cannon with some interesting trivia for those who may not be familiar with what went on during the making of some of their favorite '80s B movies.

A very entertaining piece, and especially as it highlights how Golan and Yoram Globus (the names Golan-Globus almost sounds like some obscure wrestler) were kind of the creators of their own destruction - taking the model that Roger Corman had done quite well for himself for decades and taking it to extremes: going to places like Cannes and pre-selling movies that didn't exist based on just a poster that would sell a product, not to mention with stars like the "Two Chucks", Bronson and Norris (someone in the film even says that script readers would put scripts that were submitted into columns for these two chucks, and it was almost like Wuthering Heights - one is for Chuck, and one is for the other Chuck").

But why did Cannon fail? Reaching farther than they could reach, as it tends to happen in rise-and-fall type of stories. The producers were keen on creating pieces of product that more often than not had a lack of quality: low-budgets, films often made for very little, and aimed to make a new 'thing' into something very quickly (the Breakin' movies came about just by Golan's daughter seeing break dancing on the street). And of course when you got Charles Bronson, even if he really doesn't want to do Death Wish 2-3-4-5, you'll still get them anyway, not to mention a Bevvy of theaters and the Thorn/EMI distribution chain in the UK apparently (this was news to me and kind of shocking).

The doc shows these people very fairly, especially Golan who was really more of the guy front-and-center - by that I mean that the interviewees don't mince words about their reputations and how they could be: schlock-meister is one such term, and wheeling-and-dealing would be the nice version. They would pre-sell many movies sometimes that never would get made, as sequels and based around concepts and ideas that were so loose (again, the poster-concept or who might be in it) that quality wasn't of concern, and as another interviewer says, they didn't necessarily have the patience to take time with a film, to work out problems with a script or even really in post-production. A theater needs to be filled, fine, here's Ninja III: The Domination, which gives us a girl who becomes a demon at times but it's also a Flashdance rip-off and there are ninjas in there somewhere, probably.

Oh, and why not make a 'stable of stars' like in Golden Age Hollywood, so get Norris and Bronson and Sylvia Kristel and many others to round out the bunch? In other words, they aren't shown as paragons of artistry: they made crap, and probably knew it, but loved movie-making in the abstract way of 'Hey, you can get an Oscar for playing this role, Brooke Shields!' And yet it's strange as they did try to get artistic cachet from time to time - among filmmakers they worked with in the 80's were Cassavetes (Love Streams, one of his best works), John Frankenheimer (a much-touted and underrated Elmore Leonard adaptation), and Franco Zefferelli (an adaptation of Othello which, according to the director interviewed for the doc, he thinks is his best film!)

Perhaps this was to off-set the view that they *only* made schlock; not that they didn't make schlock with art-house directors as well, and one of the funniest sections of the movie (right along-side the anecdote about Golan selling a movie idea to Clyde the Oragutan - no, really) is the story of Godard's King Lear, and how the director practically trolled the producers by secretly recording Golan on the phone touting how successful the movie would be with a nonsensical plot (and I've seen the movie, oh man).

But why did they fail? The documentary posits that, much in the way that the initial goals of Miramax got away from the Weinsteins after Disney bought them, Cannon tried to make bigger movies and break into Hollywood; Over the Top, Superman 4 and Masters of the Universe bombed on budgets that combined neared 90 million, a figure that Golan in the past would've been able to make 50 films out of (at least) - they made the same lack and rushed quality for products that probably weren't very good anyway.

And yet there's a fascinating moral at the end that, in a way, a lot of the crappiest of Hollywood action-spectacles and how they somehow get made can be traced to the model that a company like Cannon made (semi) successful. But through all this, Mark Watley (also director of docs on Ozsploitation and Filipino trash flicks) makes these interviews fly by with plenty of humor and some real pathos to it. These guys are not saints, but they're not absolutely abhorrent either: they loved movies, or at least the idea of them, and I like how the film shows Golan/Globus in some not-totally-flattering lights, amid clips of grade-C-through-Z trash (and with stories on occasional good movies, like Lifeforce and guilty pleasures like Texas Chainsaw 2).

When Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus took over The Cannon Group in 1979, cinema had little idea what it was in for. With the company in a dyer financial situation, Golan and Globus began churning out pictures of questionable quality at an unnerving rate, making a small profit with the odd micro-hit that quickly added up. Soon enough, the exploitation pioneers were buying up cinema chains, paying movie stars ludicrous amounts of money, taking over Cannes, and releasing some of the most diabolical and insane movies of 1980's. Electric Boogaloo tells the rapid rise and even faster implosion of the notorious studio, with the people both in front of and behind the camera telling their own anecdotes of the madcap antics that seemed to engulf their every production.

Director Mark Hartley has made a career in documenting exploitation cinema with Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), and Electric Boogaloo is undoubtedly his most fun. Packed with clips of such cinematic disasters as Enter the Ninja (1981), Hercules (1983), Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), the film lambastes Cannon as much as it adores their persistence, levelling the field by also showing us their more interesting efforts - the likes of Lifeforce (1985) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), both directed by Tobe Hooper - and the films that were surprisingly great, such as Runaway Train (1985) and Barfly (1987). But this isn't just a collection of clips from some of the most outlandish films ever made, Hartley ensures that the film is highly informative about the 'creative' minds behind the company and the reasons for its inevitable fall from grace.

Amongst the interviewees are John G. Avildsen, Franco Nero, Dolph Lundgren, Robert Forster, Bo Derek and Alex Winter, all telling stories that will have you laughing as well as questioning just how the Israeli's got away with it for so long. Some of it is brutal, with Golan especially coming across as an ego-maniacal tyrant with little care for the safety of his crew and no understanding of the American audience he was targeting. Yet it's all told with a nostalgic fondness, celebrating the fact that these were little guys who actually made it, and doing it all on their own terms. They were, after all, responsible for Chuck Norris's career and the prolonging of Charles Bronson's (although it's questionable as to whether or not that's a good thing), and were eager to give great but fading directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Franco Zeffirelli another shot with complete artistic control. It's a strange story - Golan and Globus clearly adored cinema but didn't seem to understand it - but this is a success story like no other, and insomniacs with little to do at night but watch TV have a lot to thank them for.

You remember Cannon Films don't you ? No ? It was an independent company similar to how Miramax is today . The only difference is that Miramax is headed by professionals in the shape of the Weinsteins' who while an acquired taste are very good at what they do . Cannon however were headed by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus AKA "The GoGo Boys" and if the Weinsteins are professionals then the GoGo Boys were enthusiastic amateurs and as someone who sat through their films I still don't know what was worse , their enthusiasm or their amateurishness !

Cannon made a wide range of genre films throughout the 1980s and the one thing they nearly all shared in common is that they gave the impression they were being written as they went along . Guess what ELECTRIC BOOGALO reveals ? Go on guess ? If the producers suddenly had an idea while the film was being shot then the idea was included whether it fitted with the film or not . How about a remake of a long forgotten British period drama THE WICKED LADY ? What's the selling point ? Boobs , full frontal female nudity , boobs , naked woman having a whip fight and boobs . You want to do a high brow bio-pic on Mata Hari ? Then employ a lead actress addicted to cocaine and alcohol and emphasise the selling point is going to be lots of sex and boobs . You want to make a science fiction horror film as a homage to Hammer then employ a young French actress with very nice boobs

To be fair LIFEFORCE was a very enjoyable film and not every Cannon film had to have boobs featuring prominently . They also made films featuring Chuck Norris killing lots of bad guys , usually ones on the extreme left and made Norris a star with the studio . They also resurrected the career of Charles Bronson , so much so that every script reader was ordered by the studio to put every prospective screenplay in to two separate piles - one suitable for Chuck and the other suitable for Charlie boy . The idea that the screenplay might be a philosophical drama that the GoGo Boys wanted Jean Luc Goddard to direct didn't really matter because Chuck or Charlie were going to star in it and that's all that mattered ! You do get the impression there was an element of self delusion going on here

What really sank Cannon was the GoGo Boys over reaching themselves . Now DEATH WISH 3 isn't the greatest film ever made - though like LIFEFORCE it is hugely entertaining - but it is very cost effective , doesn't cost all that much to make and would recoup its money . Unfortunately the studio started making bigger more expensive films that would constantly flop . Again LIFEFORCE would be an early example then the debacle of SUPERMAN IV which had worse effects than you'd see in a present day SyFy Channel production then a hugely expensive flop starring Sylvester Stallone as an arm wrestler in a film I can't recall ever seeing so very soon Cannon went under which isn't surprising since the GoGo Boys asked for a film starring "The girl Stone" What everyone thought was they meant a little known TV actress called Sharon Stone and after the contract was signed it transpired the GoGo Boys meant the actress from ROMANCING THE STONE Kathleen Turner

I'm not making any of this up and this just gives you a small tiny flavour of ELECTRIC BOOGALOO an absolutely fascinating documentary featuring two of the most eccentric and lovably deranged producers who have ever walked on to a film set . If you've got even the slightest interest in cinema - and you wouldn't be reading this unless you have - make sure you catch this movie as soon as possible

In Tim Burton's Ed Wood, a cheapshot movie producer snorts at Ed's desire to create art on a shoestring. The irony is, of course, that however artistically credible he imagined himself, Ed Wood made junk anyway. There's a sweet spot where good intentions, lack of talent, and thriftiness meet, and Cannon Films regularly found it. The Asylum's mockbusters might be keeping the bad movie dream alive, but can you imagine a modern mini-studio greenlighting the likes of Superman, alongside Death Wish, alongside Shakespeare?

Cannon was set up in the 1960s but rose to prominence/notoriety in 1980 when it was sold to Israeli cousins Yoram Globus (the money man) Menahem Golan (the would-be moviemaker). This is where Mark Hartley's breakneck documentary joins the sordid story. Talking heads – directors, editors, and actors – provide snappy anecdotes and bitesized insights into the passion and incompetence of two upstarts who, for a time, upset the Hollywood establishment. And then spent $25m on an arm-wrestling movie.

Though remembered for Chuck Norris nonsense and some seriously ropey fantasy and sci-fi (Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce will make you question the value of cinema), at their peak Cannon were bashing out nearly 50 films a year. This left room for 'proper' movies from the likes of Franco Zeffirelli and Godfrey Reggio; Cannon even bagged an Oscar for Best Foreign Film at their mid-eighties peak. But for every Company of Wolves or Barfly there were five Charles Bronson Z-movies, so Cannon will always be remembered for the balderdash, churned out chiefly to take advantage of the burgeoning home video market.

Indeed, this is the perfect Eighties trash story, beginning with The Happy Hooker, the strangely apt story of a European prostitute coming to the US and sticking two fingers up to the Hollywood elite. The party ended with Cyborg in 1989, a Van Damme oddity which has little to do with cyborgs and whose creative failure rests partly on the shoulders of Albert Pyun, who would later find cinema's comic book nadir with his mouth-dryingly terrible Captain America. Cyborg was built with bits of Masters of the Universe, which gives us a clue as to the state of Cannon's finances at the turn of the decade. A brief 90s relaunch provided nothing of interest.

Perhaps there's a three-hour version of this documentary which delves into more depth and supposition about the essential culture clash that meant Globus and Golan failed spectacularly, time and time again, to grasp the mood of the nation they adored. But then the film would lose its briskness and humour, and Hartley's superb Uzi-editing would go to waste. It's a shallow documentary about men with shallow dreams, and it's enthralling for it.

The only real art to emerge from Cannon were exceptions that proved the rule. That rule being: Make 'em quick and make 'em cheap. By the time the bloated excess of Masters of the Universe was vomited into the multiplex (I recall that particular disappointment sorely) audiences expected more. Hartley's film may ultimately overstate the influence of Cannon – although with a new Terminator movie potentially about to join Jurassic World, Avengers, and Furious 7 at the top of the year's box office, the business model that spawned five Death Wishes and three Delta Forces does seem disturbingly prescient.

There was a time in the 1980s, each evening my older brother would turn up with the latest pirated video he could get his hands on. Some of them had not yet been released in British cinemas.

Too often tended to be Cannon films, the latest Charles Bronson revenge flick. It would be an exploitation movie with violence, nudity and action.

Even then you realised that they were bad movies but Cannon churned them out on almost a monthly basis.

Israeli Go-Go Boys Golan and Globus were once described as the last movie moguls. Chancers who claimed to love cinema but found that nudity and sex put bums on seat.

When they came to Hollywood the quickly moved up the cinematic ladder thanks to pre sales and junk bonds. They made movies such as Superman IV, owned cinema chains and film studios around the world. It quickly came crashing down.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is an highly enjoyable tongue in cheek documentary about Golan and Globus. In retrospect it is a good job the duo did not take part. It allowed actors who worked with them, former associates who made the movies to be more candid.

Only one contributor speaks directly to the camera that Golan and Globus faced sneering hostility from the Hollywood establishment because they were foreigners. To the rest, they were two men who had lots of ideas, bagful of energy but on rare occasions they would stumble into making a good movie.

The Cannon story was never going to end well. This documentary gives reasons why.

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS is a documentary that does exactly what it says on the tin. That is, to celebrate the wild heydays of Cannon Films, a 1980s production house who put out some of the biggest, silliest, cheesiest, and most effects-fuelled films of that decade.

It's a rise-and-fall tale, brought to live via copious clips and lots of interview footage with various stars, directors, and producers who were involved with the films themselves. Thus for a cinema fan - especially somebody who's seen a lot of the films, like myself - it's a real visual treat. The film is a celebration of the Golan and Globus approach - which is to churn out film after film, hoping one or two of them will be a success - and the eventual hubris which saw the company's downfall. It's constantly funny as well, which really helps.

Love this movie for the overview of one of my favourite schlock companies and while they do a good job of talking to everyone, the lack of Chuck Norris's and Charles Bronson's words (tough since he's dead) means you miss out on some alternative insights. I think a detailed book is in order. Or maybe a three hour cut of the movie that allows for more exploration into some of the crazy making of stories and lets more people talk. Still love the movie, just wish there was more here.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Israeli friends Menahem Golan and Yoren Globus came to America with a passion to make movies, drawing their motivation from cherished childhood memories of trips to the theatres and seeing the great American films on show. The only trouble was, they'd had no formal training in the art of filmmaking, and as such had no idea what they were doing. The result was a succession of ultra low budget, 'cheesy' (as they say!) shlockfests during the 1980s that made names out of stars such as Michael Winner, Chuck Norris, Michael Dudikoff, Dolph Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme. But their overkill and reckless desire to make more and more films, without even writing scripts or getting the funds necessary to make them, saw their film studio, Cannon, take a massive crash into extinction at the end of the decade.

I must be one of the curious cult that found an interest in the Cannon franchise growing up, and appreciated the cultural impact they left on the 80s, in their own, distinctive little way. It seems they made quite an array of different pictures, only a few of which I was really interested in, mainly the action films of Norris, of whom they made quite a big star, but that's not to say films such as Death Wish 2 and King Solomon's Mines escaped my notice with their awfulness. There was a knack for making terribly lit films with would be massive special effects that highlighted the ultra low budget, which even more so many years on, gives them even more of an unintentional comedy feel.

The film presents a quick fire succession of talking heads, recounting their involvement with the company, without providing much in the way of any background researched information and allowing the story to develop any true sense of a solid base. That's not to say the talking heads don't give us enough of an account of these two bull headed men coming from their homeland to dominate Hollywood, just not in the most effective way. Depth may not cross the mind of some aficianados such as myself, happy to lull back and relive the nostalgia these wonderfully awful films invoke, and as such you may still have a good time.

It certainly is a nice trip down memory lane, and highlights just how seriously cheap and cheerful some of your favourites were. ***

As a cinemagoer in the mid-80s, anything with the Cannon logo on it was a dead cert to be terrible, but we still went to see it. This film beautifully celebrates the crass B-movie qualities of the creations and the creators behind them. Just so entertaining to re-visit it all. Highly recommended to anyone who was there and wants to re-live their memories.