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Thursday 30 May 2013

Cannon Group Films, Golan-Globus Productions: Dodgy movies from the eighties

A trip to the video library in the 1980's meant shelves and shelves of Golan-Globus fodder. The output ranged from the arty farty like "Runaway Train" (Jon Voight) and "Company of Wolves" (both 1985), to the respectable - Meryl Streep's "Evil Angels"/"A Cry in the Dark" (1988) to the downright awful -  Bo Derek's "Bolero" (1984).
Mostly it was B action/exploitation movies: Chuck Norris dross, "Missing in Action" (1984), "The Delta Force" (1986) or youth-oriented break dancing movies like "Breakin'" and the sequel "Electric Boogaloo" (1984).
There were a few bigger budget efforts like "King Solomon's Mines" (1985), the Tobe Hooper's fascinating but nutty "Lifeforce", Tobe's remake of "Invaders From Mars" (1986) and the guilty pleasure that is "Superman IV, The Quest For Peace" (1987). By the end of the eighties the wheels were starting to come off the Cannon cart, sliding into bankruptcy by the 1990's.
You had to admire the chutzpah of these two Jewish cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Kings of the Video Library bargain bin.

4 comments:

  1. You can't make this stuff up. Tobe Hooper said that Golan and Globus made him edit Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 while he was still filming it. I miss those crappy movies.

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  2. What stuff is made up I? I omitted Texas Chainsaw 2 (made in the same year as Invaders from Mars) as I have not seen this flick.

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  3. Sorry. "You can't make this stuff up." is an American slang expression. It's comparable to saying "This almost sounds too weird to believe, but it is true." Anyway one of my other favorite Cannon stories is how they made the first two Missing in Action films back to back. Golan and Globus decided they liked the 2nd film better so they reversed the release order.

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  4. Good story.
    Now I see you can read "You can't MAKE this stuff up" in two different ways.
    Thanks (from Australia).

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