Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS (2014) Three-and-a-half stars

There’s bad movies and then there’s movies released by Cannon Films.

Cannon became one of the most productive motion picture studios in the 1980s, known for producing schlock on an epic scale.

You might remember Cannon from their productions SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, THE DELTA FORCE, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, BLOODSPORT, OVER THE TOP, KING SOLOMON’S MINES, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN, and, of course, BREAKIN’ 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO.

Once upon a time, I believe I wrote that cousins and Cannon heads Menahem Golan (1929-2014) and Yoram Globus were never responsible for a “good” film.

It sure does seem that way at times with their Cannon canon, but I might have been guilty of practicing a little bit of hyperbole. Never. And it’s not like Cannon was never guilty of the same.

I watched many of these films growing up and thus, I watched ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS with a certain nostalgia.

I’ll take a bad film produced by Cannon over many, many good films. They’re never ever boring, unlike so many prestigious prize winners over the years.

For example, I’ve never considered OVER THE TOP a good movie in any traditional sense, but it’s always been great fun watching this incredible cinematic train wreck that combines “arm wrestling, child custody, and truck driving” into a macho soap opera for the ages. See, your regular bad movie would not take on all three of those subjects and play them full tilt. Child actor David Mendenhall mugs so heavily that I check my wallet every single time I watch OVER THE TOP and his emotional moments with Stallone are so cringe worthy.

Anyhoo, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO is filled with many, many nuggets of juicy information.

— Golan honestly believed that Brooke Shields would win an Academy Award for her performance in SAHARA. Come on, are we talking about the same Brooke Shields, one of the worst actresses ever to disgrace the screen? SAHARA marked the last Cannon picture that MGM distributed; MGM called it “Dry as the Sahara desert … it was awful.” During his review of the 1985 Chevy Chase and Dan Akyroyd comedy SPIES LIKE US, Gene Siskel mentioned that he watched the film while he was on vacation in Hawaii and that Hollywood studios should show him a movie every time he’s on vacation in Hawaii because he’d like anything … then he remembered that a year-and-a-half before, he saw SAHARA in Hawaii and it nuked his see-a-movie-in-Hawaii-and-like-it theory.

Rather than winning an Oscar, Shields instead became the first and so far only actress to win both Worst Actress and Worst Supporting Actor (“Brooke Shields (with a mustache)”) at the 1984 Razzies.

— Cannon wanted “that Stone woman” for their RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and ROMANCING THE STONE rip-off KING SOLOMON’S MINES.

Golan meant Kathleen Turner, star of both ROMANCING THE STONE and JEWEL OF THE NILE, but instead “that Stone woman” was interpreted to mean Sharon Stone, who had a limited filmography at that point in her career.

Seemingly everybody hated Stone during the production.

Legend has it that crew members pissed on Stone’s bathtub in her trailer.

Stone said that her contribution to both KING SOLOMON’S MINES and the sequel ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD was her bad hairdo running through the jungle. She took work on POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL next to have some fun after the stress of both King Solomon films and her divorce.

Here I thought it was a chance to work with both Brian Backer and Billie Bird (1908-2002).

— SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE is one of the worst super hero movies of all-time and rates with JAWS THE REVENGE as the worst third sequel released in 1987.

This is a film where the IMDb trivia is infinitely more interesting than the final product.

For example, the SUPERMAN IV entry begins promisingly, “Christopher Reeve publicly regretted his involvement in the film. He stated, ‘SUPERMAN IV was a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career.’”

The special effects on the picture are shoddier than probably anything you’ve ever seen, as Cannon slashed the budget by $20 million during the film’s production.

Another juicy bit from the IMDb, “Christopher Reeve’s flying harness was concealed under a larger version of the red shorts he wore for the costume, making his waist look bigger. In previous SUPERMAN movies, the bigger waist was hidden by the cape, quick cuts, or creative camera angles. In this movie, the bigger waist is clearly visible, leading some reviewers to speculate that the thicker waist was Reeve’s actual waistline.”

You could say SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE rates a 10 on IMDb, if you add 6.3 points from the trivia section to the 3.7 score the film earned after 39,268 votes.

You could also say that Cannon had no business making pictures like SUPERMAN IV, would-be blockbusters that proved to be dead in the water.

— ELECTRIC BOOGALOO reminds (or informs) one that Cannon took chances on John Cassavetes’ LOVE STREAMS, Andrei Konchalovsky’s RUNAWAY TRAIN, and Jean-Luc Godard’s KING LEAR, for example, respectable films coming from a studio not known for respectability.

— Overall, taking in the wide (and wild) variety of films produced by Cannon, everything from break dancing to ninjas and Michael Dudikoff to Chuck Norris and Bronson to Indiana Jones rip-offs, you might be tempted to conclude — like I do — that yesterday’s bad movies are sometimes better than today’s good movies.

— ELECTRIC BOOGALOO itself surpasses all of the Cannon “classics” in entertainment value.