Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films

[Samus Aran]

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were two movie-obsessed cousins from Israel who became Hollywood’s ultimate gate-crashers. Following their own skewed version of the Great American Dream, they bought an already low-rent brand – Cannon Films – and ratcheted up its production to become so synonymous with schlock that the very sight of its iconic logo made audiences boo throughout the 1980s. And yet who could have foreseen how close they came to nearly taking over Hollywood and the UK film industry?

From 1979 to 1989 Golan and Globus ‘flushed’ out more than 120 films featuring ninjas, nudity, wooden action heroes, threadbare plots, unintentional humour and accidental moments of genius. When Menahem insisted on getting ‘that Stone woman’ for a shameless re-tread of Indiana Jones, instead of Romancing The Stone’s hot property Kathleen Turner, he inadvertently launched the career of Sharon Stone. With hair-trigger randomness, these un-kosher cousins turned a renegade independent outfit into the seventh Hollywood major with an aggressive pre-sales policy – selling movies that hadn’t been made (or written!) - an insanely prolific schedule of cheap mass production, a reputation for creative accounting, and a litany of hilarious misadventures.

The cousins’ mud-against-the-wall approach to film-making found them constantly churning out product to keep their ever expanding company alive - always hoping the next production would be that elusive $100 million blockbuster. It couldn’t last, and their partnership crashed as many of their movies had done.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is not just a hilarious tale of scattergun movie making, but of two cousins whose passion for cinema changed the way movies were made and marketed, and how ultimately this passion would come between them and the company they built together. This is a one-of-a-kind story about two-of-a-kind men who (for better or worse) changed film forever.

Looks like something that movie buffs and historians would get a kick out of. Trailer is NSFW for about half a second.

Electric Boogaloo- 30th Sept & 1st Oct at Cinema Nova, From 9th Oct at Dendy Newtown - YouTube