To the critics and the film industry weasels in the 1980s, Cannon Films were lowly schlockmeisters who had ten bombs for every one hit they put out. Whatever ambitions they had—and Cannon’s Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus were very ambitious—were constantly dashed against the rocks of inherent bad taste.
To us kids though, Cannon were the kings of the video store and cable TV. We saw that blue hexagon logo in front of every Chuck Norris exploding jeep movie. We saw it in front of that Bo Derek movie in which she got stark nekkid on HBO late at night. It was in front of Breakin’, which, for a week or two, made every kid in America want to do the Hand Glide Freeze and the Master Swipe (I still remember my older cousin and I in 1985 trying to learn break-dancing in his garage from an illustrated BOOK that he got from Safeway; I’m sure we did great). You couldn’t miss it at the start of those clumsy Richard Chamberlain swashbucklers that kinda sorta almost gave us our Indiana Jones fix. And it was right at home in front of Dolph Lundgren’s impersonation of a slab of raw ground beef in Masters of the Universe.
Cannon was fine with us. Still, even we, a bunch of gullible failed break-dancers, knew that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was horrendous.
That film is one of many nails in Cannon’s coffin (they officially folded in 1994) presented by this breathlessly entertaining documentary. It tells the tale of two Israeli filmmakers who were the big fish in the small pond of their home country’s movie industry and how they went Hollywood and flamed out with a bang, but not before amassing a legendary string of trashy movies and wild stories from the trenches along the way. As personalities, Golan and Globus were the OPPOSITE of everyone else in the movie industry. They hated the Hollywood power lunch scene and the years of talk, negotiations and umpteenth drafts of the screenplay that usually happen before a movie got made. No, loudmouthed Menahem Golan, in particular, was the kind of guy who’d come up with an idea for a movie on Monday, get some writers on it by Tuesday, get an illustrator to start work on the poster by Wednesday, have the budget worked out by Thursday and hopefully get a director before the weekend.
Cannon were also the opposite of the lower-rung exploitation-pushers in many ways because Golan and Globus thought BIG. They didn’t have the financial prudence of Roger Corman, who had dollar-stretching and profit-reaping down to a science that worked and, thus, saw no reason to ever change it. By contrast, Cannon always seemed to have their eye on expansion. Bigger stars. Bigger explosions. More and more movies—more movies than the major studios had in production at the time—constantly being shot all over the world. Golan and Globus even went after name directors, such as Franco Zeffirelli, Barbet Schroeder, John Cassavetes and Jean-Luc Godard. Cannon wanted to be PLAYERS and they played every game they could hoping to score, and then collapsed from exhaustion and resources pissed away.
A motley crew of interviewed talking heads here speak freely and not always kindly. Michael Dudikoff, Dolph Lundgren, Sybil Danning, Luigi Cozzi, Alex Winter, Diane Franklin, Tobe Hooper, Catherine Mary Stewart, Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson, Robert Forster and pretty much anyone else still alive who did memorable work for Cannon (with the notable exceptions of Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Golan and Globus themselves) show up. What they tell is a kind of Icarus story. Golan and Globus didn’t have the wings for the sun they wanted to fly toward, however fiercely they worked for it.
There are rays of hope, though. Over time, Cannon films have become cult items (and this documentary will only expand that) that offer a particularly strong taste of the 1980s for an early 21st century that craves it. This also reminds us that no film is ever made solely for its time. A movie is also made for the future. However badly it bombs and however much the critics hate it when it comes out, its story is far from finished.