[yasr_overall_rating]
A one-of-a-kind story about two-of-a-kind men who (for better or worse) changed film forever.
Many of today’s younger generation will never have heard of Cannon Films. They were established back in the 1980s by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, two men from Israel who were cousins and who grew up watching and had a fascination with American movies. When they finally moved to the United States, they set up Cannon Films which produced a slew of low-budget skin flicks such as “Hot Bubblegum,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “The Last American Virgin.” After they proved to be very successful, having been shot on a miniscule budget, the company began to branch out into the horror and action genre and helped re-establish such Hollywood action men as Chuck Norris in the “Missing in Action” movies and Charles Bronson in a number of “Death Wish” sequels as well as a couple of standalone films.
Both Mr. Golan and Mr. Globus made movies faster than they could write them and therein lay the problem: while their company released more movies per year than any of the major Hollywood studios, the majority of them were awful. Apparently, they didn’t care about story development and character exposition, they just wanted gore and action on the screen. Many of their special effects laden movies, like “Masters of the Universe,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” suffered terribly and were laughed out of theaters because the two men were such cheapskates that they would cut corners from their movie budgets every chance they got and the final result, for the most part, were special effects films minus the special effects.
However, they did manage to resurrect the careers of many Hollywood stars like Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Richard Chamberlain, Lee Marvin, Sybil Danning, Robert Forster, Franco Nero, Jon Voight, Shelley Winters, Gena Rowlands and Faye Dunaway while also giving up-and-coming new actors their break into the industry, actors such as Michael Dudikoff, Sharon Stone, Alex Winter, Olivia d’Abo, Dolph Lundgren, Brooke Shields, Marina Sirtis, Diane Franklin and Jean-Claude Van Damme, to name but a few. Cannon’s action-oriented films always made money for them and when Menahem offered Sylvester Stallone a then unprecedented $12 million dollars to appear in “Over the Top,” a movie about arm-wrestling which ultimately tanked at the box office, he inadvertently changed the movie business forever.
Suddenly, all of Hollywood’s top players wanted $12 million dollars per movie, then $15 million and then $20 million. And what’s more, they got it. Cannon Films were synonymous with cheesy and while some of them were fun, others were plain terrible. Although Chuck Norris seemed to be their golden boy, headlining three successful “Missing in Action” movies, about rescuing POWs after the Vietnam War, he also appeared in less-serious fare, such as the Indiana Jones ripoff “Firewalker” and “Invasion U.S.A.,” a precursor to 9/11 about terrorists attacking the United States. Richard Chamberlain’s “King Solomon’s Mines” was, like the aforementioned “Firewalker,” an Indiana Jones ripoff, right down to Indy’s trademark fedora and handgun.
The movie also talks about a then young Sharon Stone who was so hated by cast and crew because of her diva-like behavior, for a scene in that film’s sequel, “Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold,” Stone’s character was to immerse herself in a hot-tub but unbeknownst to her, almost everybody involved with the film peed into the water beforehand, causing her to question the weird odor emanating from the tub. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and a lot of the films that Cannon made, at the time, were great fun, for the most part but looking back at them years later, most do not hold up well. Titles such as “America 3000,” “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” “Masters of the Universe” and “Ninja III: The Domination” get progressively worse with each passing year.
However, Cannon did produce some genuinely entertaining dramas such as “Street Smart,” the movie Christopher Reeve said he wanted to make in return for appearing in “Superman IV” and which introduced a much younger Morgan Freeman to the world in an Academy Award nominated performance. Other strong movies included “Barfly” with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, “The Ambassador” with Rock Hudson and Robert Mitchum, “Duet for One” with Julie Andrews and Liam Neeson and “The Company of Wolves” which was directed by Neil Jordan and starred Angela Lansbury and Stephen Rea. The problem Cannon had, according to almost everyone who appeared in this documentary, is that Golan and Globus spent way more money than they actually had and in the end, it contributed to the company’s demise.
The producers of this film stated that they reached out to both men to be interviewed but they declined. And that’s a shame because while many of the people included herein worked directly with both men, hearing from the guys themselves would have made this film even better. When Tobe Hooper had the success with his 1982 classic “Poltergeist,” he was signed up for a three picture deal with Cannon but all three movies flopped. The first and most ambitious was the 1985 sci-fi opus “Lifeforce,” followed by “Invaders from Mars.” Both movies flopped bigtime but when Hooper informed both men he was making a sequel to his 1974 classic “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” everyone figured it would be a huge hit. Sadly, it too died at the box office.
Cannon Films made a lot of movies from their inception in 1980 to their collapse in 1994 and what’s more, they were produced by two cousins from Israel who grew up with a love of American movies from the time they were kids. Cannon may not be around any more but their films live on and while many of them were instantly enjoyable but utterly forgettable, there’s no denying that they filled a void for the theater-going public for many years and they helped rejuvenate many Hollywood stars who were beginning to fade out of the public’s consciousness. After watching this documentary, full of movies that I haven’t seen in years, it’s made me nostalgic and I might just log into Netflix this weekend and see what they have. Highly Recommended.
This movie will be released on Blu-ray & DVD later in the year
