Review of Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) by Brad S — 24 Feb 2016

With a massive fondness for the entire style of films produced by Cannon films, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films sounded like a documentary aimed directly at me.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films starts back before any of the Menahem Golan films that I had ever known of, and so the story starts out as promising. Ultimately, it is not without its moments. But most of the time, it is without a lot of things it takes to constitute a solid documentary,.

When I first started exploring the world of cinema, I jumped straight into Cannon Films due to my passion for B-movie action vehicles headlined by stars such as Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. My expectations for Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films were for it to serve as a mild insight into the process of that kind of filmmaking as well as exploring the legacy of the company itself. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a very fast-paced documentary, cutting through its historical recounts and interviewes at a very fast rate. This is because it has a lot of stories to tell, but at the same time there is a limited time to do it in and so everything is packed in pretty tight. I can appreciate the inteded ambitions of the film, but the lack of genuine depth and understanding provided by the film makes it ultimately as skin deep and shallow as the countless guilty pleasures produced by the film company that is chronicled.

There is a distinctive lack of insightful depth in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films which means that it largely ends up feeling like a behind-the-scenes piece from the DVD release of a film. The film only lightly touches upon a lot of films, and though it emphasizes the best attributes of many movies produced by Cannon Films as much as it emphasizes the worst of others, there is never much depth put into them. This means that the quantity of films thrown at the viewer is overwhelming, and yet the quality of information provided regarding each feature is underwhelming. This disappointing me because though I know that many films such as Invasion U.S.A. or Cyborg did not have much in the way of stories behind them and therefore got their full stories told, others are reduced to the same standard when there is so much more to tell. Because of this, the quality of the storytelling in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is ultimately inconsistent. And even though the documentary is a strong display of the filmography of Cannon Films which left me wanting to explore them all over again after seeing it, I feel that as a documentary it could have been a lot deeper. Considering that I have a soft spot for many of their films and I consider The Delta Force to be a personal favourite, I was disappointing on a truly personal level. In all honesty I will admit that I knew much about Cannon Films from reading on pages about the production of their films, but the standard for a documentary is that it goes deeper than a Wikipedia page. Since I got ultimately more out of the Cannon films Wikipedia page than this documentary which instead supplied a sporadic collection of footage from many films and a series of a opinions on the film produced. Very rarely do we get actual insight into the minds of anyone involved, and though there are occasionally some insightful pieces of information about certain films, a lot is missing. Even the role that the attempt to produce a film based on Spider-Man had in damaging Cannon films is forgotten about. This would be more relevant than ever today because of how the Superhero genre is in its heyday and the fact that Spider-Man is in yet another reboot as I write this.

The same goes for Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. We get a sense that they were ambitious but flawed creators of guilty pleasure cinema and particularly the idea that Menahem Golan was a merciless filmmaker. However, we've heard this story many times and so what really matters is getting an understanding of precisely who they are as people. Both refused to be involved in the documentary and the personal life of Menahem Golan is barely touched upon, so the result is meandering. Perhaps nobody will ever know who Menahem Golan truly is, but Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films does not bring us any closer to understanding him which is truly a problem.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films might have been more entertaining if it used more stock footage, but ultimately it is made mostly out of boring, repetitive and shallow interviewees which teach us nothing about the films. We get a sense of the experience thanks to what little footage there is, but it ultimately does not even have sufficient visual appeal to distract viewers based on its genuine style.

Finally, the ultimate legacy of the company should have been expanded upon more. The end credits display that the influence of the company led to such great action films as The Expendables and Olympus Has Fallen. But this only comes as a sudden realization. There should have been more in the documentary to point this out and not just a few seconds because as a result of what was depicted I struggled to make the connection. I know there is a grand legacy about Cannon Films which needs to be expanded upon, but Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films just ultimately didn't do it in the end. As much as I enjoyed the brief interviews with people such as Dolph Lundgren, I felt like they were underutilized in the film for people with such big names, ultimately leaving even the star appeal that headlined many Cannon Films productions absent in a documentary about a company which made star vehicles.

So despite its ambitions, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a shallow documentary which paces itself too fast to even take a brief moment to actually look into the complicated production tales of the films or those involved, ultimately failing to emphasize the lasting legacy of the company's former glory.