Mark Hartley’s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films is the Australian director’s third shlock-doc in a row, coming as it does after Not Quite Hollywood, his superb history of Ozploitation cinema, and Machete Maidens Unleashed!, his toothsome survey of trash-heavy 1970s B-movies shot in the Philippines. It examines the career of Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus, two Israeli cousins who, having given birth to the domestic Israeli movie industry (with a nostalgia-heavy sex comedy named Lemon Popsicle), landed in Hollywood in the late 70s and built an empire making terrible, ultra-cheapo B-movies boasting boobs by the boatload, bloodshed by the tankerful, and special effects that were anything but special.
Their bargain-basement galaxy of stars included Charles Bronson, after nobody in Hollywood could stand working with him any more, Chuck Norris, whom nobody in Hollywood was ever likely to mistake for an actor, and past-their-peak actors such as Sylvia Kristel and Bo Derek, hired less for their thespian abilities than for their extreme commitment to shirtlessness above and beyond the call of duty.
Like many a bottom-dwelling B-minded production company, Golan-Globus kept a weather eye out for formulae and franchises that looked promising, then ripped them off and got their own project into the cinemas before the studio version had a chance, often sailing to success on the slipstream of the studios’ own publicity campaigns. They dreamed up ridiculous scenarios of their own, had their art department knock up posters, took a slew of them off to Cannes and the other film markets, figured out which posters elicited the strongest response – and sold them sight unseen. Only then would a script get written.
The movies, often wildly successful, were bottom-shelf all the way: Death Wish 2, 3 and so on, Norris’s Invasion USA, The Delta Force, Derek’s Bolero, The Last American Virgin. Yack! They even booked a short-lived distribution deal with the poshest studio of all, MGM, and it is a treat to see Metro exec Frank Yablans talking of his association with the Go-Go Boys like a man scraping dog muck off his trouser-cuff.
Cheap as they were, they lived continually on the margin. It couldn’t last for ever, and it didn’t. When the bill comes due, you can’t pay it with bullshit, no matter how much of it you have on tap.
Here, unlike in his previous docs, Hartley has found his first monotonous subject. Bad taste is, in the end, just bad taste: Golan-Globus’s tacky ideas never changed or developed, and the movies themselves lack the ferocious, hell-for-leather good cheer of their Ozploitation or Filipino equivalents. There’s no shortage of good stories here – of egotism and crassness, mainly – but like Go-Go’s movies, they become repetitive very quickly indeed •
