When he wasn’t busy scoring 3-4 holes in one every time he played golf or coaching North Korea’s soccer team via invisible cell phone, Kim Jong-Il was an avid movie fan, whose favorite films were said to be Rambo and Godzilla. He even wrote a book about filmmaking, On the Art of the Cinema, which contained such passages as:

“Actors must be ideologically prepared before acquiring high-level skills,” he writes, recommending a kind of communist method acting. “No revolutionary actor has ever actually been a Japanese policeman or capitalist . . . To effectively embody the hateful enemy, the actor requires an ardent love of his class and a burning hostility towards the enemy.”

Additionally, you may be required to wash Michael Bay’s Ferrari. In 1978, Jong-Il kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, imprisoned him for four years feeding him grass and rice, then abruptly let him out and gave him millions to make propaganda movies. One such movie was Pulgasari, a Godzilla-like monster of capitalism who, like all capitalists, had an insatiable hunger for iron. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Guardian has a more than adequate rundown, and SPOILER ALERT, it includes something called “a lion gun.” God, propaganda is the best.

Pulgasari is a monster of the people. When the wicked king oppresses the people, a jailed blacksmith moulds a tiny character out of rice, declaring he will use the last spark of his creative power to bring the doll to life.

As the farmers are starving under the king’s rule, the doll, Pulgasari, eats iron and grows. The cherubic toddler Pulgasari soon becomes a horned beast whose clawed foot is the size of a person. And since this is a movie made under the guidelines of On the Art of the Cinema, there are seemingly endless shots of the people’s folk dances.

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In the annals of cinematic male rape, even before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there was Deliverance, which forever entered “Squeal like a pig!” into the national lexicon. Today, the world mourns as the man who uttered that famous line, Bill McKinney (above right), is dead at 80 from lung cancer. Ladies and gentlemen, today, we lost a titan of buttrape. (*solemly pours out KY*)

McKinney was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had an unsettled life as a child, moving 12 times before joining the Navy at the age of 19 during the Korean War.

Discharged in Long Beach, California, in 1954, McKinney settled in southern California, attending acting school at the famous Pasadena Playhouse in 1957, where his classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Mako. McKinney supported himself as an arborist, trimming and taking down trees, a job he continued into the 1970s, when he was appearing in major films. McKinney has had a life-long love affair with trees since he was a child. [*stifles snicker* -Ed.]

After his time at the Pasadena Playhouse, McKinney was admitted to Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. He made his movie debut in the exploitation picture She Freak (1967) and was busy on television, making his debut in 1968 on “The Monkees” (1966) and attracting attention as Lobo on “Alias Smith and Jones” (1971). But it was as the Mountain Man in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), a movie nominated for Best Picture of 1972 at the Academy Awards, that brought McKinney widespread attention and solidified his reputation as one of moviedom’s all-time most heinous screen villains.

In his autobiography, Burt Reynolds (whose character dispatches The Mountain Man with an arrow in the back) said of McKinney, “I thought he was a little bent. I used to get up at five in the morning and see him running nude through the golf course while the sprinklers watered the grass….”

McKinney denies this, and also disputes Reynolds contention that he was overly enthusiastic playing the infamous scene where his character buggers Ned Beatty.

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Well, you know what Serious Cat in a banner picture means, serious news. Less than a month after a stunt performer was killed during an explosion mishap on the set of the Expendables sequel in Bulgaria, a crewman has died while working on the set of GI Joe 2 in New Orleans. Serious set accidents also befell crew members on the sets of Hangover 2 and Transformers 3. Under the circumstances, I think it’s high time we consider a law against sequels.

Officials at Paramount Pictures confirm … the crew member was working on tearing down the set, when something went terribly wrong.
Sources connected to the production tell us … the man was working on a “condor” — a high-powered lift — when the machine tipped over and the man sustained fatal injuries.
Paramount released a statement saying, “Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the [crew member's] family at this time.”
The statement continues, “The safety of our cast and crew is our top priority and the studio is fully cooperating with all investigating agencies as they examine the circumstances surrounding this unusual accident.” [TMZ]

Well that’s pretty terrible, and obviously our thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and family. I’d also like to take this time to request that if I happen to die falling from a Condor, tell my family that it was an actual condor. I would’ve wanted it that way.

A stunt performer has died on the set of The Expendables 2. The accident was reported by a newspaper in Bulgaria, where the film is shooting, and was confirmed by Nu Image, the production company. He has not yet been identified. Okay, I’ll admit, my headline wasn’t in the best taste. An innocent person dying is no laughing matter, unless it’s a clown.

Police reported that a stuntman working on the movie The Expendables 2 has been killed and another injured and taken to hospital after an accident on the Ognyanovo dam near Elin Pelin.
The accident took place when the two men, both reported in the Bulgarian media to be foreigners, were performing a stunt involving an explosion in a rubber boat on the dam.  The individuals concerned were members of the film’s second unit stunt team. The film’s main unit were reportedly shooting in Bansko, two-and-a-half hours away, at the time.
The injured stuntman is in stable condition, but is unconscious, according to hospital sources reported in the Bulgarian media which has also reported that he was in intensive care. [SofiaEcho]

UPDATE: From the Hollywood Reporter:Two stuntmen were in a rubber boat in the water when, around 7 pm local time, a planned bomb explosion went wrong. One of the stuntmen was killed on the spot. The other was taken to hospital in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where he remains in serious condition.

So it appears Bulgaria might not be the bastion of strict job safety standards we all had assumed. Learn something new every day, I guess. It just goes to show, not even God wants an Expendables sequel. How many more people need to die before we learn that retro novelty films don’t need sequels? At the very least, everyone in the cast should have to get a tattoo of this guy’s name.

Additional Note: The best part of that banner image? Why the f*ck are they at the stock exchange?

Veteran movie ‘That Guy’ Charles Napier died this week at the age of 75. Napier was probably best known as Murdock in Rambo First Blood Part II or Jack in Three Ninjas Knuckle Up, or for looking sort of like a thin Brian Dennehy. Napier had been a long time resident of Bakersfield, California (“home of the easily contented”), and the local paper there provides the most thorough eulogy:

Though the Kentucky native was most proud of his work as a thoughtful judge in the Oscar-winning 1993 film “Philadelphia,” it was his go-to role as a steely-eyed tough guy in movies that ranged from pure schlock to Hollywood blockbusters that assured his legacy.
“I always felt I played myself or some kind of version of myself. If you think about it, old actors probably don’t even have a self,” he told The Californian in March before the release of “Square Jaw and Big Heart,” the refreshingly candid and high-spirited memoir of his life as an actor.
Napier was born on April 12, 1936, in Allen County, Ky., the second of three children born to a homemaker and tobacco farmer. He joined the Army out of high school, despondent after an athletic scholarship to college failed to materialize. He was stationed in Germany for three years and credited his time in the service with developing social skills he never learned during his rural Kentucky upbringing. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Western Kentucky University in 1961 and appeared in his first stage play, “Love Among the Ruins,” a short time after graduation.
After bouncing around Florida, New York and San Diego, Napier arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. He found work as a substitute teacher and made mischief with a bunch of unknown actors on the cusp of counterculture fame: Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. After Nicholson helped him find an agent, Napier soon landed his first bit part, on the television series “Mission: Impossible.” Napier played a military guard, who patrolled alongside a German shepherd. The first line he would ever mutter on screen was fitting for a career that would feature a rogue’s gallery of heavies:
“He only bites when I smile.” [Bakersfield.com]

Napier seemed like a decent actor, despite almost always playing military or police guys, so this is only partially relevant, but it’s amazing how much of a career an actor can have based solely on looking a certain way. Specifically, I was thinking of James Rebhorn, who I just saw in Real Steel playing (shocker) a stuffy, A-hole rich guy (they even put him in an ascot, because that’s not cliché at all). He plays that same character in everything and he’s not even that good at it. The guy’s made hundreds of movies, based solely on the idea that someone who didn’t know anything about him saw him one day and said, “Hey, Tommy, don’t that guy look like a rich douchebag?”

“Oh wow, he really does.”