All genre fans are familiar with the iconic hexagonal logo of Cannon Films. Revamped in the 1980s by film-obsessed Israeli expats Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus as the premier production house for low-budget, high-return genre moviemaking, Cannon changed the way that populist films were financed, produced, and marketed. Yet even while the company made its cheerfully disreputable name churning out unabashed exploitation fare — from Breakin’ and Lifeforce to the Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion U.S.A. and the belated sequels to Michael Winner’s Death Wish and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — it also pursued art-house respectability by financing such projects as John Cassavetes’s Love Streams and Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear. Director Mark Hartley has a strong track record of chronicling cinema’s seamy underbelly and here recounts the rise and fall of Cannon with archive clips and a plethora of candid interview subjects including: Bo Derek, Franco Nero, Dolph Lundgren and Elliott Gould.
“★★★★ Entertaining (more so than most Cannon films), but also insightful about bizarre strands of 1980s film history.”
– Empire
“★★★★ This scrappy behind-the-scenes exposé superbly captures a moment in time while also revealing the ugly side of a studio whose business model saw them both emulate Hollywood action blockbusters and take risks with edgier projects”
– Little White Lies