Netflix pick for 3/1/16 – ‘Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films’

“Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films” is an excellent documentary about one of the most infamous movie production companies in the history of the Hollywood, Cannon Films. Not only does this documentary go deep on this company’s crazy history and really dive in to the insane filmography these folks created over the span of ten years, but it also spends the time to tell us all about the head of the company, Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus, two men who had considerable success making movies in Israel and had hoped to replicate that success in America. And while they certainly gave it the old college try, they didn’t exactly set the world on fire with their movies. But they definitely attempted to.

Having achieved some success early on with successful sequels to the very popular “Death Wish” and with a series of movies that helped make Chuck Norris a star, the initial bread and butter for Cannon Films was the 1980s action genre, to which they made such contributions as “American Ninja” and “Cobra” and “Enter the Ninja” and pretty much anything with a ninja in the title. In addition to all of these crazy low budget action movies, they cranked out movies in all other genres, with a handful of them even turning in to bona fide hits like the “Breakin’” movies and “Missing In Action” and whatnot, and they even dipped their toes in the big budget game with stuff like “Masters of the Universe” and “Superman IV: The Quest For Peace.”

And successful or not, if there is one thing just about all of these movies have in common, is that they are all different levels of terrible. As such, it must have been easy for the makers behind “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films” to go through and pull out clips from each movie that really emphasize how insane all of these projects were at the time. So many Cannon films were just weird, and they were made on tight enough scheduled and small enough budgets that nothing ever came out the way it was originally intended, and as a result we get a decade of low budget insanity, which makes for some great clip packages.

This is a highly entertaining documentary and one that might make you want to take your own journey through the films of Cannon, and trust me when I tell you this, just stick to the documentary because most of those movies were trash. So watch “Electric Boogaloo” here on the Netflix and enjoy the nuttiness.