Electric Boogaloo entertainingly looks back at Cannon Films, the Fyre Festival of indie movie studios

Mathilda May does her impression of me halfway through a Blu-ray of an '80s Cannon Films action movie in a scene from the big-budget 1985 Cannon flick Lifeforce.

This is the sixth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. It has taken me since January 2016 to finish writing this post about Cannon Films. I don't know why. Writer's block can really fuck you up sometimes. This is why I can't wait to leave this blog behind so that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay will become my only ongoing blog. After December, the only writer's block I'll have to worry about will be the block that keeps trying to prevent me from finishing my novel manuscript.

You've seen MacGruber, right? Now imagine if MacGruber wasn't a comedy. That's basically what an '80s Cannon Films action movie is like.

MacGruber is a Cannon movie played completely straight, except for a couple of big things: the profane update of MacGruber's old theme song (a tune from his days as an SNL character) and the intentionally offbeat dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, who weepingly delivers the least dignified and most sob-filled monologue in action movie history ("Just join my team. I'll suck your dick!"). Everyone else in MacGruber, whether the actor is Ryan Phillippe or the late Powers Boothe, is interestingly directed by Lonely Island troupe member Jorma Taccone to take the proceedings completely seriously, including even Maya Rudolph, aside from her silly sex noises while her dead character's ghost bangs MacGruber in a cemetary.



Phillippe and Boothe react to MacGruber's pantsless moment of desperation in the military office as if this were Michael Clayton or Spotlight instead of an Inspector Clouseau flick (or any other farce where everyone, including the straight man, gives a big and broad performance). Their underplayed seriousness actually increases the hilarity quotient of MacGruber's abnormal behavior.

Taccone's movie is a terrific parody of the schlocky Cannon house style, from the strange one-liners that sound like they were written by a 57-year-old Israeli movie producer ("Shut your butt!") to the ultraviolent heroes who, in real life, would be locked up in an insane asylum for their psychotic behavior (see MacGruber's "KFBR392" scene). If you took the dour and unintentionally funny 1986 Cannon movie Cobra, which I never watched until I rented it on YouTube a week ago, and you turned it into a comedy about how the behavior of matchstick-chewing supercop Marion Cobretti, the only person in the world who cuts pieces off his slices of pizza with a pair of scissors, actually looks to the world outside the narcissistic-at-the-time brain of Cobra star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, it would probably resemble MacGruber.

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The first Deadpool flick makes a Cobra reference I wasn't aware of until Outlaw Vern pointed it out (it's the scene when Ryan Reynolds quips about the matchstick between Gina Carano's lips and wonders aloud if she's a Stallone fan). Taccone and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick all clearly watched Cannon movies like Cobra when they were kids, just like how I was subjected to a few Cannon cheapies as an '80s kid.

One of those movies was 1987's Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, which was one of Cannon's two attempts to update the then-100-year-old Quatermain novels in the wake of Indiana Jones, and I still remember how dreadful the production values in Lost City of Gold were (it should have been called Lost City of Plastic). Currently streamable on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian-made 2014 documentary directed by Aussie filmmaker Mark Hartley, is the highly entertaining story of why during the '80s and early '90s, a name like Cannon meant it had to be not-so-good. It's hard to dislike any documentary that devotes five minutes to the lambada movie war of 1990.

Cannon was, of course, embroiled in that vicious war over who could first rush into release a movie about a dirty dancing craze from Brazil that was barely sweeping the nation. Nobody won the war between Warner Bros./Cannon's Lambada and Columbia Pictures/21st Century Film Corporation's The Forbidden Dance. The only winners were quippy film critics who got a kick out of tearing apart terrible movies. For five silly minutes, Electric Boogaloo recounts how obsessed Menahem Golan (pronounced "muh-nawk-um go-lawn"), the aforementioned 50-something Israeli movie producer, was with trying to get The Forbidden Dance completed in time for its spring 1990 release date, while Yoram Globus, one of the producers of Lambada, and his collaborators toiled over their rival project. Golan and Globus were not just former business partners who ran Cannon (into the ground). They also happened to be cousins.

Tip-Top Quotables: "No one should ever be allowed to say there is no history of racial tension here," plus a few other great lines this week

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "Much as I scoffed at the very notion of a good MacGruber movie, I'd probably put it at the very top of SNL adaptations. At a minimum, it's the one SNL-to-screen adaptation to take a mostly one-joke sketch idea (e.g. 'It's Pat' or 'The Roxbury Guys') and successfully expand and reconfigure it for the screen. And while I'm here, I'll echo the praise for [Will] Forte's performance, which is committed and fearlessly self-deprecating. After all the things he does in this movie—the loud back-to-back sex scenes, the celery stick, the 'just tell me what you want me to fuck' scene—he can probably bid farewell to any Al Franken-like political aspirations he might have had."--Scott Tobias, The Dissolve, "The '80s ambience, jury-rigged gags, and dumb bravado of MacGruber"

* "Every good spoof needs a straight man. Airplane! had Leslie Nielsen's Dr. Rumack, who never cracked even as he pulled eggs out of a sick woman's mouth. Blazing Saddles had Gene Wilder's Waco Kid, who didn't bat an eye at outlaws punching horses in the face. [Powers] Boothe's unflappable Col. Faith is a sturdy presence throughout MacGruber, but the movie's true straight man is [Jorma] Taccone, who shoots MacGruber as if it were a legitimately badass balls-to-the-wall action spectacular. Most modern spoofs, shot on the cheap by hacks, look like garbage. MacGruber looks good enough to stand beside (or, in some cases, ahead of) its inspirations. No matter how broad Forte gets—and at one point, he's waddling through an action scene naked, with a celery stalk hanging out of his ass—Taccone never shoots him like he's in on the joke. There are many deadpan actors; Taccone is the rare deadpan director."--Matt Singer, The Dissolve, "From box-office bomb to cult favorite in the making: Classic MacGruber"

(NOTE: The Harold Faltermeyer-esque score cue from the "celery stalk hanging out of MacGruber's ass" scene starts at 2:00 of "MacGruber's Suite" by MacGruber score composer Matthew Compton. Don't miss the profane hidden track that starts at 5:30.)

* "There was no main title... and I didn't make a theme for [the end credits] either because I always wanted to leave on whatever tone the outgoing scene had. So there was a different end-title piece of music each time. It's one of the most important chunks of musical real estate because it's a chance to sum up your musical story, but there's no picture, there's no dialogue. It's not competing with any other sound. It's a great spot to showcase the music. So, the end titles became my favorite spot. But I also used it as a place to do something that was unexpected. One track is called 'Falling off a Bicycle,' and another one is called 'Goodnight Nurse Elkins.' Those started out as one-of-a-kind pieces. I hadn't written anything like that for the rest of the show. So, I threw my hardest musical curveballs for the end credits."--Cliff Martinez, discussing with TVGuide.com the electronic score music he wrote for the first season of The Knick



* "Composers were close, and often attended each other's recording sessions. One such day, Elmer and his friends were listening to one of their peers record a score with a strikingly memorable theme. They snuck a few musicians to a smaller studio, and recorded a jazz combo version of this composer's theme, arranging it from memory. That night, when they all got together socially, they played their tape, telling their mark it was the radio. Shocked to hear a small combo playing his own theme, the panicked composer turned white and asked what the music was. Elmer and his friends told him it was a hit song that had been on the radio for weeks. The poor composer thought he had accidentally ripped off a popular song, and momentarily contemplated the task of rewriting his entire score! Elmer and his fellow pranksters laughed, and poured him a drink."--Outlander composer Bear McCreary, recalling an elaborate prank that his mentor Elmer Bernstein told him he used to pull on other film composers

* "Even though that theme was used on The Next Generation, I associate it with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was like the coming of Jesus Christ to me. The score is super thematic, it's deep, it employs many modern sounds. Despite the fact that Goldsmith was traditional, he was always trying to find ways to be with the times that were, so he'd bring in the blaster beam, that thing that was the new thing and some of his efforts had dated themselves, like in the '80s we used some of those electronics, but Star Trek remains timeless. That Blaster Beam thing, a lot of the water phone sounds they use and so forth. you combine that beautiful sweeping version of that theme over the most beautiful thing ever created by man— the Enterprise— and it's just complete, absolute orgasm."--X-Men: Days of Future Past composer John Ottman on the one film score he'd take with him to a desert island



* "The heart of the film is that the Guardians are all adrift in their universes, emotionally and spatially lost. So, it's appropriate that the film starts on a song that croons, 'Nothin's a matter with your head, baby, find it/ Come on and find it/ Hell, with it, baby, 'cause you're fine and you're mine.' It's a mission statement as much as a stylistic choice, a ballad of inclusion in a cold universe. It's also Star-Lord's best way of seeking out maternal advice while lost in space; the song's inquiry of 'Don't you feel right, baby?' allows Star-Lord to converse with a woman that he's lost, one who he rejected right before her passing in a fit of childish sadness. The film is, among about 50 other things, the chronicle of Star-Lord's struggle to accept that he was just afraid and not a bad person."--Dominick Mayer, Consequence of Sound, "How Guardians of the Galaxy Topped the Charts"

* "I can't believe that the only name they got right was fucking Kumail Nanjiani."--Harmontown co-host Jeff B. Davis, mocking L.A. Times TV critic Robert Lloyd's typo-ridden positive review of Harmontown, which misidentified Davis as "Jim Davis" and misspelled "podcast" as "pocast" (in fact, Davis was wrong--not even the L.A. Times critic got Nanjiani's name right either)

* "It looks more like a colonoscopy than a costume. Plus, even if you have superpowers, it's impossible to crawl along the roof while keeping your back arched and your rear high. Too many covers like that, and Spider-Woman is going to need physical therapy."--Amanda Marcotte, mocking Spider-Woman's ass-up pose in the poorly received variant cover artwork drawn by erotic comic book artist Milo Manara for the first issue of Marvel's relaunch of Spider-Woman, as part of a Slate post called "This Week in Butts"