This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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.

I just finished watching this documentary about Cannon Films on YouTube. It touches on the company's beginnings in the late '60s when it was run by one of its co-founders, Christopher Dewey who consented to be interviewed for this doc as did John G. Alvidsen who directed one of the company's first notable films-Joe about a bigot's teaming with an upper crust man in looking for the latter's daughter. I reviewed that on this site so look for my review under that title if you're interested. Then it jumps to when a couple of Israeli cousins-Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan-bought the studio for their own productions. They revitalized Charles Bronson's career when he made various Death Wish sequels and made Chuck Norris a major star with his actioners. They also made Breakin'-the quickie attempt to beat Orion Pictures' Beat Street in showcasing break dancing on film. They seemed to do pretty well for themselves but then they overextended their credit to the point to when they made Superman IV and Masters of the Universe, they went into bankruptcy which then led to their split. Various talking heads mention how things went so wrong while also telling how much charisma they had when making deals. In summary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is quite a ride in telling the story of how a studio went so out of control before anyone knew what hit them! So that's a recommendation. P.S. I remember as a teen watching two of the studio's films: Treasure of the Four Crowns-a 3-D ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark which had some entertainingly scary zoom scenes of things coming at you but not much plot or good acting. And The Last American Virgin which me and my brother watched on HBO and liked many of the nude scenes and raunchy jokes...but was shocked at the unhappy ending that came!

Sorry, I just couldn't fully get behind this film; Canon group littered video stores of the 80's with bad taste action, horror and camp teen-comedy B-movies, a few of them will stand the test of misty nostalgia (if you were fourteen when you saw American Ninja, or Barbarian, or whatever) but the films are mostly garbage. This documentaries third act gets all sentimental about Canon's rise and demise but, honestly, the only thing the producers were interested in was money; they raised enough money to run overseas distribution, invest in cinema chains and also obtain the rights to a classic film library, but then it all collapsed because, like the bad filmmakers they were, they made the classic bad business decision of over- investing, over-expanding and over-predicting how well their (terrible, embarrassing, sexist, cheap looking) movies were going to do at the box office.It DOES stand to reason that Canon are sometimes hilarious, and their one surprise mega-hit of a one million dollar budget earned about 74 million worldwide. This is unusual, and is a success story, but then the film was also nasty, derivative, mindless and probably more sexist than most other video releases of it's year. Why the interviewees claim at the films end that the Canon legacy is important is unclear; they paved the way for lowest-common denominator interests over intelligence and substance, and of course pre-sales, a concept that means a film will usually be generic in type, but the rights to distribute a movie are sold before it's actually made. Typically Menahem Golan would make up strings of improbable rubbish at meetings to try and please anyone anywhere that would finance a picture, based on the evidence of a gaudy poster and the "star quality" of people like Chuck Norris, or Michael Dudikoff. Time wastey.

Having essentially grown up and gained my adoration for film in the 80's and early 90's, sooo many of these films were my bread and butter and I had no idea they had the same studio let alone such an interesting and ridiculous back-story. The only issue I had with this documentary was actually that I'm not sure it covered enough ground and I would have liked to have seen more significant interviews from the stars that these guys made and vice versa. Because despite how bad these movies were or tried to be where would the B Movie genre be without them let alone the 80's films in general. I think the story behind the "GoGo Boys" Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus is so interesting because ultimately they were passionate but had zero experience and got way ahead of themselves and played with fire and ultimately for lucky for a very long time until they weren't lucky anymore. Still its absolutely astonishing to see how many films they made and the similarities with those films.Very very very few of the movies mentioned in the documentary could ever be described as "good" and yet anyone who grew up in this era or loved movies will agree that so many of them are "legendary" in the minds of the fans. One of my favourite Stallone movies "Over The Top", one of my favourite "bad" movies "Masters of The Universe", and one of my favourite guilty pleasure film franchises "Death Wish." They gave us silly bad-ass heroes like Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson and unashamedly used exploitation to sell their early films and yet they kept making money until they couldn't anymore. I was ecstatic when I heard about this documentary because I love these kinds of Hollywood stories but interviews with the brothers would have been very good (both were asked and refused apparently) Chuck Norris interviews would have been great, talking to some of the bigger legendary stars that Canon made or kept going. I felt like this was a pretty surface look at Canon when there was so much here to cover but really interesting nonetheless just perhaps a little too simple. 7/10