THE verdict is in.

"Nuts. Just crazy nuts."

Of all the ways to describe Cannon Films, makers of such schlock classics as Hercules (in which a bear is punched into space), The Apple ("the Mount Everest of bad musicals") and Lady Chatterley's Lover (with Sylvia Kristel), the commentator at the start of Mark Hartley's documentary has things just about right.

But as Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films also shows, there was far more to the film studio set up by Israeli cousins Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan than met the sometimes witheringly critical eye.

Hartley had already explored the more alternative by-ways of cinema in two previous documentaries, Not Quite Hollywood, about the Australian film industry, and Machete Maidens Unleashed, which looked at Filipino B-movies. Both hits on the festival circuit, fans pressed Hartley to finish the trilogy. For various reasons it had to be Cannon Films, which made 120 movies from 1979-89.

"I wanted to do one that was very much about the Eighties; the others were the Sixties and Seventies," says Hartley.

"It seemed you couldn't pick up a VHS tape in a library without seeing the Cannon logo on it in the Eighties or the Nineties. I'd also read Michael Winner's autobiography and he had really great stories about Cannon. With these documentaries it is also about meeting people I've always wanted to meet and I was certainly a big fan of Winner when I was a kid. I thought if I could meet Winner and get a good story out of a documentary then that's a good enough reason to do it."

By the time the financing was in place, however, Winner had died, as had Sylvia Kristel. There were plenty of others ready to have their say on Cannon, including Bo Derek, Dolph Lundgren and, most amusingly of all, crew members. (The cousins themselves declined to take part because, true to form, they were making their own documentary. Menahem Golan passed away last year.)

With the research done and the money in place, all that remained was finding the talking heads and scheduling interviews. Not always the easiest of tasks, and one made doubly difficult when the filmmaker lives in Melbourne and his subjects are Stateside and elsewhere.

"It's not like you can go, 'Fantastic, we just picked up so and so, we can go down the road and shoot them'," says Hartley, 45.

He prefers to let the story unfold through interviews, rather than go the easier route of having a voiceover. That means a lot of prep before the cameras start rolling and the travelling begins. With all three documentaries it has been like a military operation, he says.

"There were people who said we could talk to them but we couldn't fit into their schedule, they couldn't fit into ours, so we didn't end up getting to them. But we shot for four and a half weeks and we managed to interview close to 100 people."

The story that emerges is a fascinating one, not least about the cousins' passion for filmmaking.

"They managed to find that niche where they could sell American style product to overseas distributors who the major studios had knocked back. That was the genius behind the company. The problem with Cannon was quantity seemed to be much more important than quality ... But they certainly had film fever. Menahem particularly lived, breathed, ate, slept, dreamed cinema. You've got to have a begrudging respect for them, certainly for that."

More importantly, as far as today's filmmaking business is concerned, is the business model for making movies that the cousins helped to pioneer. Under Cannon, movies would be made on a "pre-sale" basis. What came first was the idea, and in the cousins' case the poster, and on the back of that money was raised. Independent filmmaking today works to a similar model, albeit the timescale is more stretched and tortuous. The cousins could have a poster one day and be in production in a matter of weeks.

"In a way it's something I wish certainly still existed, that you could get in to an elevator at the ground level and by the time you get out at level three you had a five picture deal."

They also paved the way for today's independents through "groundbreaking" agreements with the Hollywood unions, adds Hartley. In addition, they successfully exploited the home video market, and they created stars (Sly Stallone, Sharon Stone among them), producers and directors still working to this day. There were also some pretty good films in their back catalogue, among them Otello [CORRECT] directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who called the cousins "the best producers I ever worked for."

But there was also, as the documentary shows in hilarious detail, many a film that will not be finding its way into the archive of classics. Still, as all three of Hartley's documentaries demonstrate, there is always a wider story to tell, be it about the budding Australian cinema industry, making films under martial law (Machete Maidens Unleashed), or taking on the big boys (Electric Boogaloo). At its height, Cannon Films made a lot of money and climbed to the seventh spot on the Hollywood studio ladder. So given the context laid out in Hartley's documentaries, is there such a thing as a purely bad film?

"Having watched 200 Cannon films I can say there is certainly such a thing as a bad film," laughs Hartley down the line from Melbourne. But the thing about Cannon was that, unlike some others, they never set out to make a bad movie.

"There were artists, good cinematographers, good editors, good composers working on those films. They are just commercial action films and commercial genre films but through a very strange prism of this kind of European-Israeli mindset.

"That is the reason why they didn't connect with American audiences back then, but [is] the reason now why they seem to stand apart from a lot of other cinema films and are now constantly being revisited. There's a crazy DNA to them."

With his trilogy of documentaries complete, Hartley, who also has some 150 music videos behind him, can go back to his original job as a feature filmmaker. His last feature was Patrick (2013), a thriller starring Charles Dance.

"That is most certainly it," he says of Electric Boogaloo. "I'll leave documentary film making to the professionals." I ask how the Australian film industry is faring these days.

"It hasn't been in good health for a long time. It's very hard to get Australians to go and see local product. It's hard to get anyone to go and see a film in a cinema unless it's a big blockbuster style films and they're not the films we make in Australia."

But he is reading and developing scripts and can't wait to get back on a set again. Like the subjects of Electric Boogaloo, it is clear Hartley too eats, sleeps and breathes films. One wonders if he will miss his documentary looks at other studios, and in particular the stories that emerge, including the time Menahem met Clyde the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose. What happened? You'll have to see Electric Boogaloo to find out...

[itals] Electric Boogaloo, Glasgow Film Theatre, June 5-11