Later Than They Think

Time might be dark, but they aren't so bad. It's at time like this that we should appreciate the good things. It isn't too late to appreciate a good sunset.

I don't bring up Cannon Cruisers a whole bunch on Wasteland & Sky for the simple fact that it is a bit of a separate project from what I do here. This place is about both appreciating and creating general entertainment and art, while Cannon Cruisers is purely about inspecting a specific era in art and entertainment. It's a bit more of a specific specialized interest. I decided to finally start Cannon Cruisers, and roped a friend along for the ride, because I was awakening to the fact that movies devolved and became more or less trash.

I was confused as to where all that moxie and creativity went in movie-making, and decided to inspect the era where it was at an all-time high. That would be the period from the mid to late '70s up to about 1995 or so. Even past that period you can see a decline in overall movie-making until we get up to the abysmal period of the modern day.

Let's be real, the '10s were a pretty abysmal decade for film. Sure there were some good movies, but a tiny handful does not negate the irrefutable fact that entire genres are dead and gutted, and most everything else is peppered with postmodern nonsense such as nihilistic messaging and viscous historical revisionism. It's a wasteland out there, and nowhere ear where it was decades ago.

Of course, there are those that will disagree, but they are missing the bigger point here. Yes, you saw two good movies last year. Congratulations to you. That doesn't mean cinema is hunky dory, and it doesn't mean the system is fine or still worth saving. Pure garbage with no redeeming value is being pumped out into people's heads. We are a long way from the day when movies were made to make viewers feel better about themselves and the world when walking out of a cinema. It is not as it once was, and hasn't been for decades.

Cannon Cruisers was created because I was watching the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (I have yet to see the other documentary the Israeli cousins put out themselves), and was hit with the cold hard reality that this modern climate was unacceptable. There was really no reason there shouldn't be anyone like Cannon Films around today. What they created could easily be replicated by anyone: simple genre, drama, family, and action, films all done with a pulp-inspired action and audience-first formula. There was no secret ingredient in Cannon's success that didn't boil down to working at pulp speed and giving the audience what they wanted. That is literally all they did, and they made bank on it.

Now, I am not going to pretend it was all sunshine and roses with the Israeli cousins at Cannon. There are stories and rumors of underhanded dealings they engaged in (though, if this is the worse they did then they are already pure saints compared to the rest of Hollywood) and they had plenty of duds, but one thing was certain: they always tried to deliver something to the audience. The cousins, Golan and Globus, loved movies and wanted to entertain people. Everything they did was for the twofold purpose of making movies with a low enough budget and using that small profit to make more movies. They grew with this formula and steadily their budgets improved until they forgot their roots and went in over their heads spending money. They had no political agenda, no pet social issues to push, and no qualms about doing anything if it meant selling a movie to anyone who wanted it.

In many ways, they were the ideal movie studio, and it gave them a character few others managed, even to this day. Cannon Films were completely unlike anyone else.

However, not everything lasts forever. From 1980 through 1994 (or thereabouts) Cannon Films were the king of b-movie entertainment, mostly gaining profit the home market. Boys and male teenagers were their bread and butter audience, and they loved what the studio put out. Cannon more or less ran the home video market throughout that time and helped bring rental shops and eventually movie stores into prominence. But by the end of the 1980s Cannon was already running out of gas after near a decade of solid output.

Their quality began to shrivel, their ideas were getting more and more half-baked, and Hollywood had all but dismantled the action movie by the early '90s. The audience had been redirected towards big budget blockbusters, and nothing else. Smaller studios, many of which caused gave the films of that era its identity had faded away since they could no longer compete with the top dogs. By the end of the 1990s all that was left was the big budget studios, and nothing else. It is no wonder that the decades that followed contained far less character than what came before.

There were a few other studios that came during this time, but there is one I want to mention in particular, since I have been covering them recently on Cannon Cruisers. They are nowhere enar as well known as Cannon, but they were quite impressive nonetheless.

At the end of the 1980s, a studio named PM Entertainment emerged. They didn't come around at the best time for b-movies, being that those nuggets of entertainment were on the way out. They have gone rather unknown even to this day. In fact, anyone can name from Troma to Cannon themselves, but no one would dare bring up PM Entertainment. They just aren't as well known.

This despite the fact that they put out around 90 or so movies between 1989 and 2000. That's right, they were at their peak in the 1990s, long after every other b-movie studio had more or less died. A studio like this naturally piqued my interest, beckoning me to learn more. So I did.

There is a good deal of information on PM from this oral history found on hopesandfears.com. It would be easy to mistake them as a studio from another era, because in just about every way that counted they were. If you are into this sort of b-movie scene, you will even have heard about four of their movies (The Sweeper, Hologram Man, Repo Jake, and Little Bigfoot) which appeared on Red Letter Media's Best of the Worst show on youtube. The latter two movies really deserving of the honor, and the first two movies ones Cannon surely wished they were putting out in 1996. But they were long gone by then. And those are only their lesser works.

PM Entertainment was formed in 1989 by two filmmakers, Richard Pepin and Joseph Merhi, the initials of their last names giving the company its name. Not long after setting up shop they had already began putting out low budget direct to video fare. This was at about the same time b-movies were kind of losing their edge. 1989 was not a particularly strong year for cinema.

Joseph Merhi was a lot like Golan and Globus at Cannon in that they came over from another country with the sole purpose of creating entertainment like that which they grew up on. No agenda, no ulterior motives. PM Entertainment started from much the same place Cannon Films did, a place of putting product before anything else. And they very quickly became a machine, just as the Israeli cousins did.

But just because they came from the same place does not automatically mean they would be putting out works of similar quality. In fact, PM's earliest work from 1989 through about 1991 was about at the level of Cannon's worst from when they also started up. And given that Cannon's 1989 material was anything but them at their best you don't have a company anywhere near coming close to them. It was a rough start for PM.

Indeed, I started a mini-series on Cannon Cruisers about PM Entertainment, and in the very first episode I covered about three different movies each from a different period in their run. The first I discussed, 1989's Shotgun, is abysmal. The plot is non-existent, the acting is ridiculous, and the action happens in fits and spurts... and rarely at that. It's like a 1970s cop movie, only wrong in every way that counts. It's hard to imagine them coming close to Cannon's best with material like this.

However, the next two PM movies I covered, 1992's Maximum Force and 1995's Rage, were monumental improvements. Watching these two were night and day compared to what came before and were movies Cannon would have died to put out. They were action packed, fun, and thrilling rides, that anyone would have enjoyed. Unfortunately, by that time in the 1990s Cannon was already dead. PM Entertainment was all that remained.

The more important thing to realize is that there was a studio in the 1990s doing what Cannon Films had once did, and no one really remembers that very studio. It's a mystery as to why that is, since the more you look into them the more fascinating they become.

These quotes by writer/director at PM, Richard Munchkin, says everything you need to know about PM Entertainment:

"Everything at PM was driven by the market. Rick and Joe hired this guy named George to become their head of sales. George would go to the market and come back and say, "less nudity, more action," and then he’d meet with a buyer from a different country and he would say, "more sex, less violence." So you were just in this crazy world of being told conflicting information constantly. The bottom line was that he was constantly coming back requesting more action, more action, more action. "Can you kill people in different ways? Can we start blowing things up? Can we have bigger stunts." The rule eventually became that somebody had to either be shooting, chasing, or fighting every seven minutes, and, if it was quicker than that, even better."

"The budgets back then were around 350,000 dollars. If Cannon had made something like Ring of Fire, for instance, the budget would have been 2-3 million. Working with really low budgets, as a director, forced me to learn how to shoot really fast. You had to design your day with speed in mind. It wasn’t about "What is the best way to tell the story," it was "how can I shoot 11 pages in one day." It prepared me really well to do television."

"PM never had any desire or care about social good. It wasn’t about promoting female action stars or Asian American action stars. It was always about the bottom line: can I sell it?"

Pure entertainment, and giving the audience what they wanted was what mattered. The strange part was that they actually did get better and better as they went. It turns out that the audience wanted better quality, because they delivered that, too. Their later movies were leagues beyond where they started at.

PM made a deal with HBO to supply movies for them, back when this was a newer thing for them, and this gave PM a leg up. They were just cranking them out one after the other, and their momentum only allowed improvement. Throughout the 1990s they put out some of the most action-packed movies you might not have watched. Starring names you might remember include Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Wings Hauser, Jack Scalia, and Traci Lords, among many others. They might not have been the A-list, but audiences didn't really care. Entertainment was entertainment. Brand name stars are irrelevant if they don't offer quality thrills.

While action movies were getting more and more procedural and bland in the big leagues, PM was going on like the 1980s never ended. Tough guys, hot women, guns, punches, kicks, and explosions, were what they offered, and people wanted just that. Naturally this made them a good alternative throughout the otherwise generic decade that bottomed out with The Matrix in 1999. They offered far more traditional fare than the mess The Matrix turned the genre into.

Now, I'm sure that will cause controversy, so let me make myself clear. The Matrix isn't technically a bad movie. It did a lot of interesting things for the time, and wasn't like much else on the shelves. However, it is very dated and very much of its a product of its time, from the humorless and dour tone to the self-serious pomp of the entire picture. The movie Dark City managed to do much of what it did, only with less dated computer trickery and more noir influence. It went forgotten while the movie with state-of-the-art CG got all the attention. Take away the gloss and you're left with a plain action movie that is missing some of the core ingredients that makes the genre work.

The Matrix has a lot of faults no one ever mentions. Aside from the hard to look at CG and the rather standard chosen one story with gnostic trappings, there are a few other issues. The movie took the masculinity out of action heroes with weakling Neo (Keanu Reeves could pull off masculinity, see Speed, but the character he plays in this is not masculine), the freewheeling fun of good guys stopping bad guys is stripped away for super-serious speeches and wanton disregard for innocent life. The overabundance of slow motion, needless posing, and typical late '90s lack of aesthetic plagues the film as a relic of its time. Unfortunately, since the late '90s have never really ended it just looks like a worse version of what is also being made today.

That's its biggest fault. It's difficult to appreciate anything the movie did when movies still more less still look exactly the same as The Matrix did even with a 20 year gap from its release. Its influence has never gone away, and we have never moved on.

Either way, the action movie was on life support back at the time. Coincidentally, PM was sputtering out by 2000 and closed its doors in 2002, a whole three years after The Matrix changed the landscape. The classic action movie, solidified in the 1970s and which hit its peak in the 1980s had finally been binned by the industry by the 1990s. The industry had successfully killed the genre.

Unlike when Cannon Films went under at the time PM was hitting its peak in the mid-90s, there was nothing to come in PM's wake. Partially because the industry had changed so much by 2000 that no one could come up in their place. At the same time, the home video market had been totally usurped by big budget studios. B-movies were being squeezed out of the market.

Per Mr. Munchkin and Kathleen Kinmont:

KATHLEEN KINMONT: It was the whole home theater thing, and the transition from tapes to DVDs that did them in. All of a sudden, they had to start competing with a great deal of other 30-40 million dollar films. Plus, I think they were just burnt out. It’s hard work. It’s like working in a restaurant; really long hours and I don’t think they could keep up the steam any longer. 

RICHARD MUNCHKIN: Eventually, the movie studios figured out what was going on. So the studios started making low budget action movies, but what was low budget for them would have Dolph Lungren in a 10 million dollar budget. By that point, PM had moved up to the 1-2 million dollar range, but suddenly the studios were cranking out these films and PM couldn’t compete. The buyers wanted stars. They wanted action but they wanted stars. PM just didn’t have the money to compete anymore, and they were able to sell the company and cash out. I think they were happy to do that.

PM was bought be the Harvey Entertainment Group and was closed less than two years later. The climate had changed too much to continue.

Yes, there was no longer a place for low budget movies when the big studios were in the way shaping what "low budget" meant. B-movies suddenly took on a whole new meaning, copying the super-serious and uptight era of modern Hollywood and smaller budgets. They changed what the little guy could do--and they could no longer directly compete.

I'm not too certain that audiences cared that much about stars, however. After all, not everyone is a star in their first movie, but that "brand" mentality did pave the way to the current remake/reboot culture we are currently in. This is due to conditioning the audience to never expect anything new and outside the framework the big dogs set down. Buy the familiar brand, and stick with it forever. This is what the studios want their customers to think. The term "lifestyle brand" exists for this reason.

But if that was the way it was, the idea that customers wanted name brands and corporate approved stars and nothing else . . . then how did b-movies come to prominence during the 1970s to begin with? Did the audience change the much? If they did . . . how? What caused this shift? As big budget movies were getting blander and blander, putting bombast over fun, (bombing out with the execrable Independence Day in 1996 and the laughable Godzilla in 1998) audiences were suddenly no longer demanding anything else? Especially when this tired studio system cause b-movies to take off to begin with? That's a hard pill to swallow.

Not to mention that this safer big budget blockbuster steadily afforded less and less pop culture cache. These were disposable and forgotten just as quickly as they arrived in cinemas. If it wasn't for adaptions of other writers outside the system such as Tolkien and Rowling then Hollywood wouldn't have had much in the way of hits during the decade to come. The big studio system basically pushed their way to the front, yet again, and elbowed everyone else out of the line. They've been flailing ever since, putting out movies that made the overrated James Cameron Titanic movie look positively daring in comparison.

As a personal example, the last comedy I watched that truly had me rolling with laughter was Tropic Thunder. It was so out of left field, and with an original idea and spin that wasn't very common at the time. In the years since, there has not been a comedy that has managed to elicit a reaction out of me beside eye-rolling at the 453rd improv comedy line about genitals or the 862nd groin hit to a hapless male lead. It's all just so formulaic and empty.

There also have not been much in the way of hits in the genre, either. I can't remember the last comedy that was a huge success. The genre is on life support.

Tropic Thunder came out in 2008, over 12 years ago. Not only that, but there have been attempts in recent years to cancel the people behind it and to slander anyone who enjoys it as some sort of horrible bigot. These people who don't udnerstand comedy are trying to control what you can and cannot enjoy. This movie was a huge hit a little over a decade ago, and not a minor one, and yet now we are pretending it is offensive and those involved should have their lives ruined. All because we o longer understand the comedy genre.

So how did that happen?

How did audiences go from expecting escapism and fun in their entertainment into accepting lukewarm gruel as a replacement? Why are changing audience expectations always conveniently about offering less variety, less fun, and less excitement to the customer? Who is demanding this lunacy?

The '10s might have been the worst decade for cinema there has been so far. I'm not even sure how that can be argued. Not just when it comes to the big tent-pole releases, either, but also for the lack of quality, simple b-movie fun. The joy has been sapped out of film-making and replaced with conveyor belt content. Action movies were stripped of their spirit. After an empty '00s of colorless Jason Bourne knock-offs, all that was left was the same cookie cutter superhero movies in the decade to follow. No one could have fun anymore.

Yes, there were some good superhero movies, but they are not the same thing.

Action movie heroes were always closer to pulp heroes than superheroes. Where they were once protagonists tasked with dispensing justice above the law and saving those that couldn't be saved, they were now just costumed brand names operating in vague ways that coincidentally meant supporting the failing societal systems which led to their current predicaments to begin with. Heroes do kill, but superheroes always have a vague and ill-defined excuse not to. There is no heroism in letting a murderer free to murder. These are not action movie protagonists.

It isn't to say there aren't some good films in this mold, but they have gotten beyond tiresome and have been the only option for action for near a decade. And they have solidified the idea that superheroes are just the postmodern version of pulp heroes.

One fights for higher ideals, the other for ill-defined ends that somehow always involve complacency and uniform thought acceptable to mainstream thought. The mainstream thought, by the way, that allows such villains to exist to begin with. That's not a hero: that's brown-shirting for the broken modern world nobody likes. That's why so few satisfy anymore.

Action movies represented more than brand loyalty: they were about the greatness of the common man, the importance of justice, and with an emphasis on creative thrills. These are three things modern superheroes do not offer. How can they when they are treated as little more than religion replacement for a lot of the fanatics who indulge in them? They are a cultural dead end. There's nowhere to go from here.

But that is what the pulp revolution is for.

There are new creators committed to bringing back this abandoned style of storytelling to those who are missing it, and attracting new customers who have never had the opportunity to experience it before. It's hard to imagine, but the '90s have been over for 20 years, and PM Entertainment has been closed down for almost as long. We've been trapped in this same era for so long that it feels commonplace. But it shouldn't. It's been enough time to admit things aren't working, so taking another path is necessary to move forward again.

The big studios and publishers might have abandoned the field after clearing it of opposing players, but NewPub is on the way to fill the gap. There is no shortage old good stuff to be found out there, as long as you know where to look.

I'm going to continue Cannon Cruisers to document exactly how much has changed from that era, and what we can learn from it. But at the same time I plan on continuing creating and delivering new experiences to an audience looking to be entertained.

It might be late, but its never too late. This ride never ends.

7 Stories of Sheer Adventure!