Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Sorry, I just couldn't fully get behind this film; Canon group littered video stores of the 80's with bad taste action, horror and camp teen-comedy B-movies, a few of them will stand the test of misty nostalgia (if you were fourteen when you saw American Ninja, or Barbarian, or whatever) but the films are mostly garbage. This documentaries third act gets all sentimental about Canon's rise and demise but, honestly, the only thing the producers were interested in was money; they raised enough money to run overseas distribution, invest in cinema chains and also obtain the rights to a classic film library, but then it all collapsed because, like the bad filmmakers they were, they made the classic bad business decision of over- investing, over-expanding and over-predicting how well their (terrible, embarrassing, sexist, cheap looking) movies were going to do at the box office.It DOES stand to reason that Canon are sometimes hilarious, and their one surprise mega-hit of a one million dollar budget earned about 74 million worldwide. This is unusual, and is a success story, but then the film was also nasty, derivative, mindless and probably more sexist than most other video releases of it's year. Why the interviewees claim at the films end that the Canon legacy is important is unclear; they paved the way for lowest-common denominator interests over intelligence and substance, and of course pre-sales, a concept that means a film will usually be generic in type, but the rights to distribute a movie are sold before it's actually made. Typically Menahem Golan would make up strings of improbable rubbish at meetings to try and please anyone anywhere that would finance a picture, based on the evidence of a gaudy poster and the "star quality" of people like Chuck Norris, or Michael Dudikoff. Time wastey.

Rewind the tape and slap it on. This is pure nostalgia-fest for those of us of a generation. I'm sure if IMDb was around back then, we'd all have been writing up reviews slamming their films and chutzpah at throwing at us much of the dross they did.Yet, many of us actually loved a lot of their old fare. The action movies at a certain age were superb fun and ridiculously good. They might have been low budget put together with the script last in line, but they still were entertaining. It kind of was the last true B-Movie era.In the UK, video was king for a number of years, and nobody exploited that market better than Cannon. I lapped up many of their films. It's wonderful to see in this documentary all the old names and how lovingly they look back, in humour as much as all else. Its terrific.Okay, the films were practically all garbage, and I've probably grown up to be too much of a film snob now to sit back and enjoy going through their movies again. However, I will be revisiting some of their old fare in one way or another, and this film reminded me of what a wonderfully silly time the video days in their heyday truly were.Thanks Cannon, from a guy who owes you a great deal.

Done with the same cheeky'n'breezy tone and nonstop hurtling pace as the blithely trashy exploitation fare its about, director Mark Hartley's hugely enjoyable documentary presents the incredible world wind story of Menaham Golan and Yorum Globus, who were a couple of impudent swindlers from Israel who ruled the roost throughout the gloriously excessive 1980's by specializing in cheerfully crass low-grade schlock made by their company Cannon Films that often clumsily attempted to capitalize on whatever trend was popular at the moment. These guys hit pay dirt with their action films starring either Chuck Norris or Charles Bronson, but ultimately got too big for their britches and sank their own studio thanks to shady financing schemes and blowing massive amounts of cash on such costly flops as Lifeforce, Over the Top (in which star Sylvester Stallone was paid over ten million to play the lead), and Superman IV: Quest for Peace (the effects budget was cut substantially halfway through production and a beefy former Chippendales dancer was cast to portray Superman's nemesis Nuclear Man!).Not surprisingly, this doc comes loaded not only with lots of nudity and over-the-top violence, but also a wealth of hysterical tales about the wild antics of Golan and Globus: Among the most choice anecdotes are Golan discussing a movie deal with Clyde the orangutan (!), how everyone hated working with Sharon Stone (who was accidentally cast in King Solomon's Mines because Golan said he wanted that Stone woman and the guy who cast her didn't know he was talking about Kathleen Turner of Romancing the Stone fame), Barbet Schroeder threatening to cut off his fingers with a chainsaw if he can't make Barfly the way he wants to, Molly Ringwald not knowing if the character she was playing in King Lear was either alive or dead, Franco Nero having his voice dubbed by another actor for Enter the Ninja, Golan and Globus making two competing lambada pictures in the wake of their acrimonious breakup, Laurene Landon setting fire to her VHS copy of America 3000 to express her disgust over her unhappy experience acting in that flick, director Michael Winner being a total sadist who was a perfect fit for Cannon, Golan and Globus failing to realize that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was intended as a comedy, Bo Derek getting told to make Bolero as explicit as possible, and Just Jaecklin remarking that the infamous Go-Bo boys had probably never read the book Lady Chatterley's Lover. While not everyone interviewed has the nicest things to say about Golan and Globus, almost everybody nonetheless generally admits that their hearts were certainly in the right place even if they possessed more chutzpah and enthusiasm than taste and decorum. It's this latter element of genuine affinity for these two kooky mavericks which in turn makes this documentary a surefire winner.

As 'Electric Boogaloo' tells it, Cannon Films was established by two Israeli wheeler-dealers, who came to the United States, established a film production company, and managed to make a huge quantity of low budget, low class movies before eventually their wild ambition caught up with them and they ran out of money. What makes the story more interesting is that this ambition was not just to establish a film-making giant, but also to make movies of at least some distinction: but a combination of unavoidable financial constraints and an inherent belief they could do it on the cheap inevitably sank their grander ambitions. This could make for a riveting film, but in fact, all we get are a succession of clips coupled with talking heads asserting ad nauseam just quite how crazy the company was. How do you actually make a low budget movie? How did the company stay in business for as long as it did, when (according to what we're told), its every film was a disaster? What is the evidence that the founders did, as we're repeatedly told, genuinely love cinema in spite of their abysmal product? We never really learn these facts. Instead, 'Electric Boogaloo' promotes a legend of Cannnon in a way that the studio's own bosses (whose talent for self-promotion is repeatedly attested to) might have envied. In fact, there's an irony here: asked to participate, the two of them made their own movie (and true to their past record, made it first). Without their involvement, there's a hole at the heart of the film they chose to spurn. Although based on the evidence presented here, I'm not sure I'd expect too much of their own effort, either.