Cannon made more than a few dance craze cash-ins. We already covered Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. In our next Cannon Month, we’ll get to the split of Goram and Globus and the same day release of Lambada and The Forbidden Dance.

Today, we salsa.

Former Menudo member Robby Rosa is Rico, a mechanic by day and a dancer at La Luna in East Los Angeles by night. He dreams of he and Vicky (Angela Alvarado, Judgement Night; she and Rosa met on this movie and remain married to this day) becoming the king and queen of salsa when they win La Luna’s Grand Salsa Competition. Yet what will happen when Luna(Miranda Garrison, Vivian from Dirty Dancing), the club’s owner, wants him for her very own?

Directed by Boaz Davidson and choreographed by Kenny Ortega, this movie is wonderfully 80s and as lightweight as a colorful sugary cocktail and may leave you with the same sugar rush and crash. Or you’ll love it like I did, because I yearn for the dance.

Also: Rico is absolutely the worst person and beyond not the hero of this movie, despite being set up to be the lead. All he cares about is Rico and salsa.

A nominee for the 1987 Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm and the movie that won Barbara Hershey best actress at that year’s festival, Shy People features the eleventh official soundtrack by the band Tangerine Dream. Want to know more about them? Check out a past article we featured on the site, Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream Film Soundtracks.

Diana Sullivan (Jill Clayburgh) may be a successful New York journalist, but she has no idea just how bad her daughter Grace (Martha Plimpton) has spiraled out of control or how bad her cocaine habit is. Meanwhile, a new assignment takes her back home and into Louisiana, where they come into the orbit of Diana’s distant cousin, Ruth (Hershey) and her brood of boys who have been taught that everything that comes from the cities is wrong.

Director Andrei Konchalovsky also made Duet for One, Maria’s Lovers and Runaway Train for Cannon. Somehow, he soon followed this with Tango & Cash which still makes me think over his choices, as that film is so alien from the rest of what I know of his work.

Roger Ebert said that Shy People is “one of the great visionary films of recent years, a film that shakes off the petty distractions of safe Hollywood entertainments and develops a large vision.”

After all the success at Cannes and such a strong review, why is Shy People nearly forgotten? Every explained it as “a great film that slipped through the cracks of an idiotic distribution deal,” as “when a major distributor made a substantial offer for it, it developed that a Cannon executive already had booked it into 300 Southwestern theaters in a quick-cash deal. The major distributor pulled out, the movie never received a proper launching..,” and that was, sadly, that.

Luckily, we live in a time when movies are as close as the push of a button. Shy People is on Tubi and you can watch it right now.

Directed by Godfrey Reggio, Powaqqatsi is the sequel to Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and the second film in the Qatsi trilogy. This is one of the few, if only, Cannon movies in the Criterion Collection. It’s also the only Golan and Globus released film with a Phillip Glass soundtrack. In fact, Glass also traveled to the locations with Reggio so that he could get a feel for the music that the movie needed.

The name of this movie comes from a term Reggio came up with that means “parasitic way of life” or “life in transition.” While the original film had a focus on modern life in industrial countries, the sequel focuses on the conflict in Third World countries between the old ways and how life has changed after the spread o industrialization.

From men carrying gold up and down a mountain in Brazil to images of villages, islands, religion, people in motion, traffic and the intrusion of advertising, you get the feeling that man is just taking up space on a planet that doesn’t need us, or as Roger Ebert wrote, “Reggio seemed to think that man himself is some kind of virus infecting the planet — that we would enjoy Earth more, in other words, if we weren’t here.”

Reggio wasn’t fully on board with using the latest in movie technology considering that his theme for the film is finding a way to return to basic life. However, he realized that technology was ingrained into our way of life and that it would allow him the best format for sharing his philosophy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

After numerous other theatrical and made-for-television adaptions where Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot, including Murder On The Orient-Express, this would be the actor’s last time playing the role.

This time, he was directed by Michael Winner, who you probably wouldn’t consider for the restrained world of Agatha Christie. He spoke to this by saying, “You won’t see Lauren Bacall walking around machine-gunning everyone. In fact, it’s my first picture in years that was under budget on blood.”

Bacall plays Lady Westholme, an American become British high society lady and a member of Parliament for the Conservative Party as the result of marriage. She’s on her way to Jerusalem along with her secretary Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills!) and lawyer Jefferson Cope (David Soul) by sea, the same voyage that also has the troubled Boynton family — Lennox (Nicholas Guest), Raymond (John Terlesky — what!?! Deathstalker!?!), Carol (Valerie Richards) and Ginerva (Amber Bezer) — who she shares the law services of Cope with, as the Boynton children are pretty much slaves to their stepmother Emily (Piper Laurie), unless the new will goes through.

Poirot also meets up with an old friend, Dr. Sarah King (Jenny Seagrove), who falls for Raymond, all as Cope is having an affair with Lennox’s wife Nadine (Carrie Fisher), which really seems to be so many coincidences that all gathered these people all on the same boat. And oh yeah, John Gielgud is on board to play Colonel Carbury. He described leaving to in this movie as such: “Leaving for Israel to do a rather absurd part in an Agatha Christie… Peter Ustinov and Betty Bacall are to be in it and possibly Michael York, so it might be fun, even with that vulgar, but quite funny director, Michael Winner.”

In late Cannon fashion, the budget was cut from $9 million to $7.5 million and then to $6 million. When they wanted to cut it further to $5.5 million, Ustinov threatened to quit and if he left, so would the rest of the cast. Most of the cast — particularly Bacall — were shocked that this was filmed in Israel in the hot summer instead of a sound stage or in England.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We watched this during our week of Van Damme on July 10, 2019. This has been updated and added for our month of Cannon films. You can also read Ten things you should know about Jean-Claude Van Damme to understand just how beloved he is on our site.

Jean-Claude Van Damme — the Muscles from Brussels — first appeared in a film in 1979, where he had an uncredited role in André Delvaux’s Woman Between Wolf and Dog. After moving to the United States with his childhood friend Michel Qissi, who plays Suan Paredes in this film and would go on to appear in several JCVD movies. Their first appearance was in Breakin’, which has gone on to be a memorable meme.

After becoming a friend and sparring partner with Chuck Norris — he even bounced at the action hero’s bar Woody’s Wharf — Van Damme would go on to be part of the stunt team for Missing In Action. Then, he achieved a sizeable role in No Retreat, No Surrender, playing the Russian bad guy Ivan Kraschinsky that Kurt McKinney must train — with the ghost of Bruce Lee no less — to defeat.

After an abortive attempt at playing the lead villain in Predator, it was time for Van Damme to star in his own film. Bloodsport — based on the maybe real life of Frank Dux — would be that movie, making $65 million on a $2.3 million dollar budget.

U.S. Army Captain Frank Dux (Van Damme) once trained in the ways of ninja under sensei Senzo Tanaka (Roy Chiao, who appeared in Game of Death, Enter the Dragon and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) after he tried to steal a katana from the master as a child. he was trained alongside Senzo’s son Shingo, who has died in a martial arts tournament. Frank goes AWOL to be part of the Kumite, an illegal martial arts battle to the death, for revenge.

That puts Rawlins (Forest Whitaker) and Helmer (Norman Burton, who played Felix Leiter in Diamonds Are Forever and the boss in Fade to Black), two Criminal Investigation Command officers, on his trail.

Once Dux makes it to Hong Kong, he becomes fast friends with American fighter Ray Jackson (Donald Gibb, Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds), which is good, because they’re the only gaijin in this tournament. However, once they learn Dux represents the Tanaka clan and how he has the ”death touch” — and Jackson breaks bricks with his forehead — they’re accepted.

After several rounds of awesome fights — this movie is pretty much all fights, making it one of the most fun movies ever made — Frank, Ray and the evil champion Chong Li (Bolo Yeung) remain. Li hates Frank for beating his fastest knockout record, but our hero is more interested in Janice Kent, a reporter.

During day two, Ray has Chong beat, but pauses to do his taunt move and gets his butt handed to him, landing in the hospital. Dux vows to get revenge for his friend, but his new lady, who he has only known 24 hours, argues that he should just leave. This woman will never understand Kumite!

The police and officers chase and catch Frank, who agrees to go back if he can finish the final battle. Chong kills his opponent and the crowd turns on him. They hate him even more when he cheats, throwing a pill packed with dust into Frank’s eyes. Frank rises above all that nonsense and wins, sparing the life of his enemy while getting revenge.

So how true is Bloodsport? According to Sheldon Lettich, who wrote the film, told Asian Movie Pulse:

“I had known Frank Dux for a number of months before I came up with the idea for Bloodsport. Frank told me a lot of tall tales, most of which turned out to be BS.” One of those tall tales were about his military history: “Frank also used to tell me, and just about everyone he spoke to, that he had participated in secret missions for the C.I.A. and the U.S. military, and that he had won the Medal Of Honor for his heroism. He even showed me the Medal, which he had supposedly been awarded by the President. Years afterwards, when numerous people began questioning his stories, he stopped claiming that he won the Medal, and then began claiming that he’d never told anyone he won it.”

That said, somewhere in all those stories, there was the idea for a movie. And Dux had a backup that could prove he had actually been in a Kumite tournament: “There was one guy who he introduced me to, named Richard Bender, who claimed to have actually been at the Kumite event and who swore everything Frank told me was true. A few years later this guy had a falling-out with Frank, and confessed to me that everything he told me about the Kumite was a lie; Frank had coached him in what to say.”

Another article in the LA Times takes the story even further, showing how Dux claimed that a rival ninja teacher was conspiring against him and that he’d been reinventing his past for decades. I’ve also read on Pro MMA Now that if you do the math, for Frank Dux to win 56 consecutive knockouts in a row in one tournament would mean that 72 quadrillion fighters were in it. That’s only around ten times more people that are alive right now.

Whether or not this movie is based on a true story, Van Damme does seven splits in it. It also features an eleven minute-long flashback, which kind of tests the limits of just how long a flashback could, should and can be. And any movie where JCVD makes this face is a winner in my book.

Based — loosely based! — on Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth with a little part of The Wizard of Oz as several actors play parts above and below ground, Albery Pyun’s science fiction fantasy tells the story of Wanda Saknussemm (Kathy Ireland), a nerd — as if — who gets dumped for not having a sense of adventure. That’s when she learns that her archaeologist father has fallen down a bottomless put near Zamboanga and before you know it, we have Atlantis, a thousand-year-old alien spaceship and a journey literally to, you guessed it, the center of the Earth.

So where does the title come from? When Wanda finds her way inside the inner Earth, she becomes the alien, at odds with gangster Mambino (Deep Roy) and Lord Over while falling for charming Charmin’ (Thom Mathews, who I always call Tommy Jarvis). Hey! There’s Linda Kerridge from Fade to Black as Wanda’s aunt and a bar owner!

Pyun and Ireland would return for the direct-to-video sequel Journey to the Center of the Earth, which suffered the Cannon curse of cuts and budget woes. The pre-production work and storyboards were wasted as the final film bears little resemblance to the script, which is why it started as a movie made Rusty Lemonrande — the producer of Yentyl and Captain EO — and Pyun coming on and this turning into a sequel. Nobody was happy with how it ended up. But it does have Emo Phillips in it.

This ran on cable pretty often when I was young. Now you can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Leave it to Golan and Globus to make a Catholic movie.

In 1858, a 14-year old asthmatic and illiterate girl named Bernadette (Bernadette Soubirous) saw a light with a beautiful young woman inside. You may know the miracle by the town she lived in, Lourdes.

Made two years after Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse, this Cannon-produced movie was filmed in both English and French. We may never see what she sees, but we come to believe that in the face of unbelievers, including the church, Bernadette must be telling the truth. Director Jean Delannoy’s also made a sequel, The Passion of Bernadette, so if this seems to end before the story does, that could be the reason.

This movie plays non-stop in one of the shrines in Lourdes, so it must be pretty faithful. No pun intended.

Colonel Kjemba (Robert DoQui, Sgt. Reed from RoboCop) has called in Vietnam vets Virelli (Peter Fonda), T.J. Christian (Reb Brown, forever Yor) and Cliff Taylor (Ron O’Neal, forever Youngblood Priest) who join up with Wilson Jeffords (James Mitchum, forever Robert’s son) and ) to stop a rebel uprising, but you know, sometimes you never know what side of the battle you’re really on.

In Richard Kiel’s autobiography Making it Big in the Movies, he claims to have only turned down four roles in his whole career. Peter Fonda’s part in this is one of them.

I mean, this is Avatar 21 years earlier and around a few hundred million less in the budget. But does that movie have Peter Fonda being racist and Reb Brown screaming at the top of all of his lungs?