Critics reviews

In style, Hartley's film is slick, crisply edited and dynamically scored, rattling through avuncular interviews and kinetic clips with the kind of breathless pace arguably lacking from some of Cannon's lesser actioners.

Kudos has to be given to Hartley for lifting the lid on a host of bad practices and making an honest documentary that could so easily have been turned into a juvenile exercise in macho backslapping. The fact that the cousins refused to appear in Hartley's film so they could release their own version in advance of his encapsulates their out-of-control, ego-driven mindset and the haphazard spirit in which they approached filmmaking.

To watch this documentary is to somehow mainline 300 Cannon movies in 107 minutes, and anyone inclined to watch this film at all will somehow find that statement intangibly comforting. Director Mark Hartley, who also made the similarly infectious Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, displays a quality that can't be faked: authentic enthusiasm for disreputable material.

Cinephiles of a certain age will eat up this off-the-charts hilarious piece of film history, recounting the taste-challenged exploits of the Israeli producers Menahem Golan (the filmmaker-showman) and his cousin Yoram Globus (the money man), who stormed Hollywood in the early Eighties and produced epic amounts of schlock and (inadvertently, it must be said) half a dozen near-masterpieces. If you've never heard of Cannon, you'll think you're watching a movie-biz version of This Is Spinal Tap.

Faster, sleeker and more out-of-control (in a good way) than its Cannes-premiered predecessor (Israeli director Hila Medalia's "The Go-Go Boys"), Mark Hartley's "Electric Boogaloo" ambles anecdotally through the legend of the late Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus with generous archival footage, film clips and an assemblage of more than 80 talking heads.

Hartley facetiously recycles [his earlier Not Quite Hollywood] adjectives (as well as the exhaustively-meme'd subtitle of Cannon films' own Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo) and adopts a tenor somewhere between Biskind and Buzzfeed for this fitfully amusing saga of the infamous B-movie studio