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Like a bizarro Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone parlayed two iconic roles into a decades-long career as a movie star and filmmaker, restauranteur, and conservative hero - only he's short and a lousy director. In 2019, Stallone put his crusading 'Nam vet character out to pasture with RAMBO: LAST BLOOD, a half-assed UNFORGIVEN riff that finds Rambo going up against some rightwing fever-dream "Mexican" human traffickers. Beyond featuring almost zero Mexicans, the film also features zero Mexico: it was largely shot in Bulgaria.

Bulgaria's rise as a filmmaking hotspot is thanks in large part to the success of Stallone's Expendables franchise, which allowed production company Millennium Films to turn Sofia's Nu Boyana Film Studios into a one-stop offshoring shop for Hollywood. Joining us to discuss his experience working on this film (!) and the state of the Bulgarian film industry is filmmaker and co-host of the Cinema Strolls podcast Roman Pessarov! We also take a look at the Rambo series as a whole, being a cinephile outside of the US, and learn that even former Soviet dads are ultimately a lot like other dads.

GREAT ep, check it out!

Follow Roman Pessarov:
https://www.instagram.com/roman.pessarov/
https://www.hopp.bio/cinema-strolls
https://kinematograf.bg/mirror-touch-film
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3355231/

Further Viewing:

ROLLING THUNDER (Flynn, 1977)
FIRST BLOOD (Kotcheff, 1982)
RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (Cosmatos, 1985)
RAMBO III (MacDonald, 1988)
RAMBO (Stallone, 2008)
EASTERN PLAYS (Kalev, 2009)
GLORY (Grozeva & Valchanov, 2016)
PICTURES OF GHOSTS (Mendonça Filho, 2023)
THE SECRET AGENT (Mendonça Filho, 2025)

Further Reading:
"The King of the Geezer Teasers" by Joshua Hunt:
https://www.vulture.com/article/randall-emmett-movies.html