Franco Nero in Golan-Globus’s “Enter the Ninja” (1981).
Franco Nero had no martial arts training, and a body double was often used in the Ninja costume.
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Cannon Studios advertising and promotional materials shown at film festivals to get investors.
Sho Kosugi in “Revenge of the Ninja” (1985).
“Only a ninja can kill a ninja.” - Sho Kosugi
Oliver Reed in the Golan Globus “Gor”
“Ninja III: The Domination” (1983)
A promotional flyer used by Golan-Globus to find funding for Spider-Man, directed by Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Tobe Hooper. The film was never made, but any film made by Tobe Hooper is worth watching.
Albert Pyun’s “Captain America” (1990), one of the last Golan-Globus films, starring Matt Salinger (the son of Catcher in the Rye author and recluse J.D. Salinger) as Captain America. It was a direct to video release in 1992.
There was a time that comic book movies were not the white hot epicenter of entertainment, but, like comics themselves, were seen as cheap and disposable low budget fare that were unconscionably half-assed by schlockmeisters like Golan-Globus and Albert Pyun, best known for cyborg future movies and sword and sorcery movies starring female bodybuilders (once is a coincidence, twice is happenstance, three times is the director’s fetish). The Red Skull was made extremely Italian, as they were filming in Italy for tax purposes. It also featured Ronny Cox as the president the exact same year he filmed his most famous role, as Martian Administrator Cohagen in Total Recall. Going from Paul Verhoeven to Albert Pyun must have had incredible whiplash. With its many scenes of attractive women pulling out firearms while wearing sunglasses, it felt more like an Albert Pyun movie than a comics movie - proof that Pyun was a true auteur, as his voice was too distinctive even in comic movies (RIP).
Blink and you miss it, but one of the most shocking moments was how Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner and the android Human Torch were mentioned in dialogue, back when that wasn’t normal and made people gasp.
Nonetheless, you would be amazed at how much breathless attention this nothing b-movie that ended up being direct to video got in the comics fan press at the time, perhaps because if you get the costume right and other texture-level details, so many other sins can be forgiven. Marvel even gave it its own comic book adaptation, back when such things were unheard of, though it sat on the shelf for years.
This is something I struggle to explain to people who grew up with superheroes dominating pop culture as they did after 9/11 (art, after all, is downstream of politics and history: it does not affect it but, merely, reflects it), but superhero fans believed their work was too weird and quirky to be comprehended and rendered digestible by something as flattening and commodifying as Hollywood, and so they believed every time a superhero movie came out, that it would be the last one for years and years, perhaps ever. This belief that the genre would fail completely if one movie failed or was bad may explain why a key characteristic of superhero fans today is a neurotic hyperdefensiveness to extremely mild criticism, even though the genre isn’t going anywhere at this point, and in fact, has become the closest thing we have to an overculture.
The seal of quality before any great motion picture. The logo of the immortal Cannon Studios, also known as Golan-Globus.
Jim Steranko