I have a love-hate relationship with bad movies.
For one thing, life is too short. I have SO many movies in my queue – good movies, CLASSIC movies – that the idea of watching a movie like, say, Death Wish 3… well, that is not in my top ten priorities. This is the same reason I still haven’t seen the new Mad Max, or Mission Impossible, or Star Wars (GASP!)… There are more important things to view and do in my life.
Also, most bad movies are not in the “so bad it’s good” category – they are just, well, bad. Only with the help from the folks at Mystery Science Theatre 3000 can I stomach some of the classic clinkers of the silver screen – they only redeeming aspects these films have are they are absolutely and eminently mockable.
When it comes to bad movies, no company produced more “mainstream” schlock in the 80s than Cannon Films (I consider Troma films as an underground movie studio). The heads of the studio, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, started out as filmmakers in Israel and broke into the US market by producing and distributing Swedish soft-core films. Their first major US release was the drama Joe, an underrated film that starred Peter Boyle (and one that I plan on reviewing for my Neglected Cinema series).
The documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films covers the rise and fall of the studio, with extensive interview and archival footage that covers all the major high (and low) lights. And the list of films covered is impressive (in it’s cheesiness): Invasion USA, Lifeforce, Missing in Action, Hercules, The Apple, the Death Wish sequels, Superman IV, Masters of the Universe, Bolero… and so on.
The thing that was most intriguing about Golan and Globus was that they really really wanted to make good movies.. They just didn’t have the skills to do so, and so they hired and funded talented filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and Franco Zeffirelli to make movies for the studio. The result of this were some really great films: Otello, Bar Fly, Runaway Train, The Assault, and more. When that Cannon Films logo displayed at the beginning of a film you didn’t know what “Cannon Films” you would be getting – the good, or the bad.
Cannon eventually grew to big to fast, and this, along with inflated budgets (as Golan and Globus started to wander away from the “fast and cheap” approach that made them successful) resulted in the studio’s demise. And not a moment too soon – they had just acquired the rights to do a movie based on the Spider-Man character. Image the bullet that we dodged THERE…
If you are a movie fan and love to learn “how the sausage was made” then Electric Boogaloo is a must see. It is currently available on Netflix.