RIP MENAHEM GOLAN

Written by Paul Gibbs and Patrick Gibbs

It's the mid to late 1980s. Possibly the early 90s. You've gone to the neighborhood video store, the one before Blockbuster where instead of 87 copies of every new release they had an astonishing number of obscure and shlocky low budget films.  They don't have that copy of Three Men and a Baby you were looking for (years from now it will be hard to remember why you wanted it so badly). So instead you pick up something off of the shelf that catches your eye. You haven't seen it. You haven't even heard of it. And when you go home and watch it, you realize why. And chances are, it was produced by the Cannon Group, under the leadership of Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus.

Golan and Globus introduced us to the idea of "so bad it's good", and for that they will always have a place in our hearts. In fairness to them it needs to be noted that they very definitely also had a more artistic side, which manifested in adaptations of King Lear and Otello, as well dramatic films like Barfly. But We'll always remember Golan as the 80s answer to Roger Corman. Here are a few of the films we most associate with his name:


SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

We have to admit we'll always have a nostalgic bond with this movie, and wish we still had the cardboard stand up of that poster you see. Superman III was Paul's  first major disappointment movie, and he actually cried himself to sleep that night over that idea of it being as bad as it was, while Patrick simply refused to accept that it was terrible because that would mean that life had no meaning. Why on Earth would you turn a Superman movie into a unfunny slapstick mess which gave more screen time to Richard Pryor than the Man of Steel? Why? So, when a new sequel came along that put the emphasis back where it belonged and brought back Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, this was cause for celebration. He even got to fight a super-powered villain again. Yes, we could tell that the effects weren't what it used to be and it just felt smaller, but we tried so hard to like that we did. And darn it, it's a Christopher Reeve Superman movie. Christopher Reeve's Superman was practically a religious figure in our family.

But it's really, really not good. Let's start with the horrible production values inherent from having a budget that barely exceeded what they paid Marlon Brando for the first film. These days an above average intenet fan film wouldn't settle for effects of this quality, and the U.N. building looks more like a City Library. From there we go some atrocious acting from most of the cast (Mariel Hemingway as the daughter of the Daily Planet's new honor comes to mind), choppy editing, ridiculous lapses in logic (why does a nuclear-powered clone of Superman look nothing like Reeve and have Hackman's voice?) and Superman's lamest power ever (rebuild-the-Great-Wall-of-China-vision), and you have an embarrasment for producer Reeve, who was lured back by Cannon's willingess to make the film about nuclear disarament. The idea of Superman interfering in the arms race might have had potential for intriguing film, but Cannon's choice to hire hack director Sidney J. Furie and refusal to give their crown jewel aquisition any more consideration than their latest Chuck Norris debacle lead to a film that Reeve had to warn co-star Jon Cryer (Lex Luthor's nephew Lenny) not to get excited about. And yet, so help us, we want to watch it right now.


GOING BANANAS (1987)
Our Dad brought this home from the video store to cheer the rest of us up one night when we were all feeling seriously under the weather. Bless him for doing that. And in  a way it worked, just not the way he intended.

Dom Deluise, a young child and Jimmie "Dyn-O-Mite" Walker (managing to somehow do a terrible impersonation of Djimon Hounsou 10 years before anyone knew who that was) have an adventure in a fictional African nation called Tangola, where the befriend the least convinsing chimpanzee in movie history and teach him to talk (because they only talk because nobody has said "Bonzo, say banana" before). Soon they're mixed up with a circus and a corrupt police cheif (Herbert Lom), and the audience is laughing at all the wrong things.

 Freakin' Jimmie Walker.




KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1985)

H. Rider Haggard's novel was written to win a bet that he could write an adventure story as popular as Treasure Island, and this movie was apparently made so Golan and Globus could win a bet that they could make the most shameless Indiana Jones rip-off ever without getting sued.

Richard Chamberlain, as iconi adventurer Allan Quatermain  is costumed to look like Indy but he plays him more like Steve Guttenberg's Officer Mahoney from Police Academy. And there is no chemistry whatsoever between him and Sharon Stone's spoiled rich girl Jesse Huston. Vilains John Rhys-Davies and Herbert Lom (notice a pattern here?) chew the scenery relentlessly, and, as always, the effects are abysmal. Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) saw much better days. Lucky he didn't stick around for  . . .



ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD (1986)

This sequel was shot back-to-back with King Solomon's Mines, but is oddly different in tone, trying to play the material much straighter. It doesn't help, though James Earl Jones as Quatermain's African sidekick does a better accent than Jimmie Walker.

Chamberlain finds the romantic chemistry he was missing with Sharon Stone . Unfortunately, it's with Martin Rabbett, the actor playing his brother (Rabbett was Chamberlain's real-life romantic partner at the time). But Stone does her best to get his attention, setting the tone for the rest of her career in a scene where she inexplicably stands up in a moving car and throws off her dress with wild abandon.

These films were the low point for adaptations of Haggard's novel until 2008, when the straight-to-video Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls took the title. But these are far more fun to give you own MST3K commentary.


THE DELTA FORCE (1986)


To be perfectly honest, we only really remember 3 things about this film:

1. Chuck Norris was terrible in it.

2. The musical score seemed to be an endless repeat of one theme played on an Atari computer.

2. At one point during a subtitled sequence, one of the terrorists says "All right" in English, and it's subtitled as "Okay".







HERCULES (1983)

Lou Ferrigno tosses around meteorites and lions, and pretends to keep a straight face while playing off of Sybil Danning in what may be the hokiest Hercules movie ever made, and that includes the two released this year.










OVER THE TOP (1987)
Sylverster Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a struggling trucker who arm wrestles on the side to make extra cash while trying to rebuild his life. Hawk's estranged wife Christina, who is very ill, asks that Hawk pick up their son Michael from mililtary school so that the two of them can get to know each other; Hawk had left them 10 years earlier. Michael's controlling grandfather Jason Cutler, a wealthy man who hates Hawk and disapproved of his daughter's relationship with him, believes that Hawk has no right to be in his grandson's life, hires his goons to follow the father and son team.

The strangest thing about this movie is that it actually works when focusing on the father son relationship, but is laughably bad when focusing on the A-Team villain of a grandfather and the arm wrestling championship. While no one openly acknowledges it, this movie was basically  remade as Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman, with robot boxing instead of arm wrestling.



While Menahem Golan is gone, the memories remain. His goofy schlock can be criticized for many things, but you can't say his movies just blended in or weren't memorable. He was certainly a unique and prolific filmmaker with a long and varied career.