Drafthouse Cinema’s Drafthouse Films has announced that they have acquired the U.S. rights to “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films” from Celluloid Nightmares.
The film was made by acclaimed cult film documentarian Mark Hartley and focuses on two cousins who created independent film studio Cannon Films. According to the press release:
“[T]he film centers on the story of two Israeli-born, movie-obsessed cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who in pursuit of the “American dream” launched an indie studio that would produce over 120 exploitation films from 1979-1989 turning a renegade outfit into the proclaimed “seventh Hollywood major.” The film is currently in pre-production in Australia with Producer Veronica Fury and Executive Producers XYZ Films (upcoming Sony Pictures release THE RAID). A theatrical release is being planned for late 2012 to coincide with a traveling roadshow retrospective of Cannon’s seminal films.”
The studio put out many action films in the ’80s, such as “Missing in Action,” “Death Wish” and its sequels and the Oscar-nominated “Runaway Train”, as well as slasher “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” comedies and musicals like “The Apple” and “Breakin'”, sci-fi like “Masters of the Universe” and Lifeforce,” martial arts films like the “American Ninja” series and “Kickboxer”, neo-noir crime thrillers like “52 Pick-Up, “10 to Midnight,” art house films like John Cassavetes’ “Love Streams” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “King Lear” and launching the careers of Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Roger Ebert said of the studio in 1987, “No other production organization in the world today has taken more chances with serious, marginal films than Cannon.”
For more information on “Electric Boogaloo” and Drafthouse Films, visit Drafthouse’s official Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.
