Avenging Force (1986)

Originally conceived by Cannon Films as a sequel to the Chuck Norris kill-fest Invasion USA, Avenging Force re-teams the stars and director of American Ninja 1 and 2. The goofy comic feel of those films is toned down and partly replaced with a darker tone, but end the result is still ridiculous and entertaining.

Ex-secret service agent, Matt Hunter (Michael Dudikoff) comes to the aid of his army buddy and best friend Larry Richards (Steve James), an African-American politician who has become a target for a racist organisation known as the Pentangle. After Larry's family is attacked and Hunter's sister kidnapped, Matt vows to take on the Pentangle one man at a time.

The script is mostly dumb and nonsensical (after a Pentangle massacre at a Mardi Gras parade, the people in the next street carry on as if nothing has happened) and the sadism and racism of the bad guys, who think nothing of shooting women and children in cold blood while throwing the N word around makes this a cruel affair at times.

Although Dudikoff is the star, Steve James steals every scene he is in with his charisma, energy, and obvious martial arts skills.

The climax is a Most Dangerous Game style chase through atmospheric Southern Gothic swamps, replete with lashings of thunder and lightning. Unfortunately, this turns out to not be quite the end, with a 15-minute coda whose sole purpose is to promise a sequel that never happened. Still, overall this is big dumb fun entertainment, that doesn't pretend to be anything else.

Invaders from Mars (1986)

Noisy, shrill and charmless, this pointless Cannon Films funded remake of the 1950s paranoid classic is everything the original wasn't.

The plot follows the original, with young David Gardner seeing an alien spacecraft land in a quarry behind his house. When his normally warm and loving dad goes to investigate he returns cold and emotionless. As this behaviour starts to spread, taking in David's mother, teachers and fellow townspeople, his only ally is the school nurse, Linda Magnuson. Can they persuade the Marines to help them stop a Martian invasion?

The original may have had bargain basement effects and obvious padding to the running time, but it also had a bleak mood and the feverish quality of a child's nightmare, which, in this context, makes the ping pong ball eye aliens and rushed plotting work. This version has a big budget (much of which went on the impressive special effects), and a knowing, ironic tone, with portentous dialogue, telegraphed scenes of tension and several scenes played for laughs, but little else beyond this.

Delta Force 2 (1990)

A sequel only in name and star to the 80s original, Delta Force 2 is typical of the shoot first, ask questions later approach to film making taken by its makers, the legendary Cannon Films studios. While the original at least started with serious intent, before spiralling out of control this one starts stupid and doesn't stop.

Chuck Norris reprises his role as Major Scott McCoy, this time going after a South American drug lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago). He has a partner, Bobby Chavez, which makes the first part feel like a buddy cop film, and once we are introduced to Chavez's ideal family life, we know he is doomed. At this point the film changes to more of a revenge thriller, akin to the James Bond film License to Kill, released a year earlier than this.

The script throws in every dumb cliché and wretched cornball one-liner known to man, and look out for the training montage that seems to be Chuck trying to cripple everyone else in the Delta Force. Not that you need an army when Chuck is on the case, of course.

Delta Force 2 retains the cheap, made for TV look of its predecessor, although as this is the 90s, whereas the first looked like looked like an episode of The A-Team, this looks like an episode of Macgyver. More importantly, like the first Delta Force, the invincibility of Chuck kills any tension, and the endless explosions eventually become tiring.

However, the real star of this show is not the unlikeable and dull Norris, or the pantomime villain Drago. Instead, John P Ryan, steals the show as Norris’ boss General Taylor. His hilarious, unrestrained take on the role makes Taylor more nuts than anyone Norris is trying to gun down or blow up, especially when he decides to go on a killing rampage in a helicopter gunship.

It is worth remembering that, for all the jingoism and flag waving on screen, at the time Delta Force 2 was released, elements of the CIA had their hands dirty, with some of their South American anti-communist friends financing their operations by smuggling drugs to the USA.

The Delta Force (1986)

Inspired by a real life plane hijacking incident, The Delta Force is an odd disjointed mix of tense hijack thriller and goofy macho comic book war film that lacks the truly unhinged quality of the most entertaining efforts by the legendary Cannon Films studios.

The plot, initially at least, loosely follows the true story of the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Libyan terrorists. Amongst other things, they separated the Jewish (or Jewish sounding) passengers and shot a US Navy diver who was on board and dumped his body on the runway. The fact that all this took place less than a year before the film's release, almost feels like a throwback to the 1930s Warner Brothers boast of having stories "torn from today's headlines"

The first half has both a tense, docudrama feel and an astonishing support cast that includes Hollywood veterans Robert Balsam, Joey Bishop, George Kennedy, Shelley Winters, and Lee Marvin, all of whom do their best, despite seeming totally out of place in a violent, cheap looking 80s action film.

Eventually The Delta Force switches gears drastically and turns into an A-Team episode on steroids, complete with flat cinematography and a cheesy rousing theme tune, with Chuck Norris leading his troops into battle, then leaving them behind so he can tear around on a motorbike that fires missiles, while all around him people shoot other people at close range without anybody getting hit, and there is a plentiful supply of cardboard boxes and fruit stands to drive through.

Ultimately though, this does start to drag, the endless explosions become numbing, and knowing Norris is invincible makes it impossible to create any peril or suspense.

Hercules (1983)

Made by the legendary Cannon studios to cash in on the likes of Conan the Barbarian, and star Lou Ferrigno's TV success as the Incredible Hulk, Hercules is very cheap and very cheerful, but it asks for so little from the viewer it's hard not to like it.

The plot sees the evil King Minos (William Berger) and the sorceress Adriana (Sybil Danning) scheming to take over the world. For this, for some reason, they need to sacrifice Cassiopeia (Ingrid Anderson), who happens to be the girlfriend of our hero Hercules (Ferrigno).

The star is not exactly charismatic, but fortunately he is surrounded by reliable European genre stalwarts such as Danning and Eva Robin who pick up the slack. The script has the intelligence of a ten-year-old, but it also has the wide-eyed innocence and energy of one too, and the delirious twists and turns have an energy that stops things ever getting dull.

This was not the first time that writer and director Luigi Cozzi had been hired to cash in on more successful Hollywood product. His previous efforts included Alien Contamination, with extra-terrestrials causing exploding chests, and Star Wars rip-off Starcrash. The latter featured some very low budget stop motion work, something Cozzi employs here, when Minos dispatches mechanical monsters to stop Hercules. This use of technology seems rare in sword-and-sorcery films and gives Hercules a minor unique edge over others in the genre.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Over a decade after his nightmarish original director Tobe Hooper returned to make a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This time however, instead of a minuscule budget and a skeleton cast and crew, Hooper had the big bucks of Cannon films behind him, something that proved to be a mixed blessing.

When radio DJ Vanita 'Stretch' Brock accidentally captures on tape the Chainsaw murder of two obnoxious callers, she seeks out the help of former Texas Marshall 'Lefty' Enright (a post rehab Dennis Hopper). Enright is on a vigilante quest to track down the cannibal family from the first film, who he blames for the murder of his nephew.

This film is definitely a curate's egg. On one hand, the script has some interesting ideas about family and social status, and there is a great darkly comic turn from Jim Siedow as Drayton the cook (reprising his role from the first film), whose award-winning chilli has some rather unsavoury ingredients.

On the other hand, much of the film feels like an empty, noisy, overblown derivative 80s slasher, the comedy is strained and the horror isn't that scary. The first film was as ground-breaking stylistically as it was with subject matter, but here Hooper follows where he used to lead, although I suppose this may have been down to demands from the money men at Cannon films. It feels like there is a good movie buried in there somewhere and from what I've read Cannon cut out a lot of the class war satire.

My recent viewing was my first watch in about 20 years and back then it was still banned in the UK. So, the thrill of watching something legendary (with Dennis Hopper in) on a third generation dub of a Japanese laser-disc perhaps made me gloss over the flaws. Watching a digitally remastered copy on TV, the context is more mundane, and the flaws more obvious.



The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - Trailer by bulldog_mini

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014)

Although Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is often little more than talking heads interspersed with clips, the jaw dropping stories, both on and off the screen, coupled with the contrasting, larger than life characters of maverick studio heads Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, makes for riveting viewing.

Golan's early life was spent learning the ropes in the Israeli film industry, before teaming up with his business minded cousin Globus and moving to Hollywood. There, they proceeded to do what many film producers before them have done, taking the latest movie trends or news stories (Operation Thunderbolt was based on the Entebbe hostage crisis) and churning out cheap and cheerful product that people wanted to see. By 1979, they were in a position to snap up Cannon Films, and spent the next decade filling cinemas and video stores with a mix of quickly made, quickly shot action flicks, (often starring the likes of Charles Bronson or Chuck Norris), thinly plotted cash-ins on the pop culture phenomenon de jour (such as the mega hit breakdancing flick Breakin' and it's sequel Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which gave this documentary it's title), and, surprisingly, occasional forays into the arthouse. All these were helped by an efficient marketing machine, churning out lurid artwork and film titles. 

 

They also had strong links to the horror genre, having started with slashers such as Hospital Massacre and New Years Evil, before teaming up with Tobe Hooper for the likes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the vampire/zombie/apocalypse/nudie oddity Lifeforce

Without the participation of Golan and Globus themselves, the film relies on those who worked alongside them in front of and behind the camera. Some of the anecdotes border on farcical, my favourite being Golan's demand that he get "that Stone woman" for the 1985 Indiana Jones knock-off King Solomon's Mines. Sharon Stone was duly cast, the film was shot – only for Golan to be horrified at his leading lady – he meant Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone.

Three things soon become apparent; firstly, the speed that many of the films were produced at, coupled with Golan's inability to stop coming with ideas, regardless of relevance to plot or character, meant that a lot of them were not always as good as they could have been. Screenwriters who had crafted tightly plotted stories found their screenplays jettisoned in favour of random action spectacle at the editing stage. Still, without that willingness to try anything we would have been denied Ninja 3: The Domination, which manages to cash in on Cannon's existing success with Ninja films, as well as ripping off Flashdance, and putting in a possession storyline straight out of The Exorcist.

Secondly, it didn't matter one jot about the quality, audiences lapped them up. This coupled with Globus keeping a tight rein on the purse strings, and the tried and tested business model of pre-selling films that had not been written yet, meant the money flowed in at an astonishing rate.

Thirdly, this success clearly offended some people in the Hollywood of the mid 80s, who regarded the crude noisy studio as lowering the high tone set by the likes of Top Gun and the Police Academy franchise.

The documentary also sheds light on the Cannon studios indulgence of some of the top arthouse directors in cinema, bankrolling films by the likes of John Cassavettes, Barbet Schroeder, Franco Zeffirelli and Jean-Luc Godard. Unlike their more commercial product, with the highbrow material, Golan and Globus seemed happy to let the artists get on with it undisturbed. The results were as mixed as their less intellectual efforts. Cassavettes' Love Streams, Schroeder's Barfly and Zeffirelli's Othello all garnered critical acclaim, but Godard's take on King Lear is a tedious baffling mess.

Inevitably, our heroes fly too close to the sun, and stray from their careful business model. Overreaching themselves, they tried to move into comic book and toy franchises, snapping up Superman, and Masters of the Universe. Both had millions spent on them before having budgets slashed (leading to Milton Keynes doubling for Metropolis) and both tanked at the box office. The final straw was the aborted attempt to make a low budget Spiderman, to be directed by Tobe Hooper, an attempt that never got in front of the cameras, and by 1988 they were bankrupt, and the movie world was a duller place.

This is not the first time Electric Boogaloo director Mark Hartley has explored a specific strand of weird and wonderful cinema, having previously made Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, which covered the exploitation films of Australia and The Philippines respectively. Here he manages to sort the crazy tale into a coherent and fast moving narrative, resisting the temptation to show off visually, letting the stories and clips tell their own incredible story.

It's easy to sneer at Cannon Films and their output, but to me they simply follow in the tradition of the likes of Roger Corman, giving people what they want (and letting people behind the camera get a foothold in the movie industry). This torch has been passed nowadays to the likes of the Asylum Studio, but although the business model may be the same, their end product usually feels too self knowingly ironic and sanitised for my taste, lacking the unhinged insanity of a Cannon classic.

Death Wish II (1982)

Despite my hopes of some trashy amoral action packed fun, Death Wish II is a joyless test of the viewer's patience. The star (Charles Bronson) and director (Michael Winner) can do better, certainly in the context of the vigilante genre, as shown in the first film of the franchise.

In the first Death Wish, Paul Kersey (Bronson) hunted down the scummiest scum of New York City, following the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter Carol. Now, several years later, he is working as an architect in Los Angeles, and living with Carol and new girlfriend Geri Nichols (Jill Ireland). After chasing down a gang who stole his wallet, Kersey finds himself followed back to his apartment by his attackers. The gang proceed to beat him unconscious, rape his Mexican housekeeper and kidnap his daughter, who falls to her death trying to escape. For Kersey, that leaves only one course of action - pick up his gun and hunt them down, one scumbag at a time.

The original Death Wish was a slickly made piece of emotional manipulation, which at least kept the viewer interested and tried to provide some justification for Kersey's actions. Here, nobody seems that bothered about putting that much thought into the script, or the direction (making violence boring is an art, but not one to be admired)

The real surprise and disappointment is the star of the film. Bronson, while never in the slightest bit convincing as an architect, is one of the great movie tough guys, with genuine screen presence and charisma, at his best when exuding an impassive and implacable sense of purpose and menace. Here he just looks stiff and dull, a robot going through the motions.

By having the gang made up of scum of different ethnic backgrounds, Winner does go some way to offsetting charges of racism, but there is no getting away from the unpleasant treatment of women. They only exist to be abused by men or to provide reasons for the men to act, although this is not an unusual situation for this genre.