Your first task is to assemble an entourage of brainless thugs. Thugs will be a major part of your plans, as you don't want to be tackling any heroes first off. You will need some excessive drawn-out violence to soften them up first. Wave after wave of expendable, drivelling idiots are obviously critical to this. Finding buffoons of a low enough calibre is always a problem, but if you follow the tried and tested checklist below, you can't go wrong.

Things to remember when picking your henchmen:

Intelligence

First you will need to give them an IQ test. If they score any higher than 60, ditch them. If your henchmen have a mental capacity greater than a squirrel, they may realise that the odds are stacked against them when faced with a man who has just killed 30 other henchmen with his bare hands, and turn on you.

Moral status

It is vitally important that your thugs have no moral status whatsoever. Test this by running over a small furry animal in front of them. If they react, they're out. If faced with a tough dilemma, these thugs may have the audacity to help the under-dog or save the kid. This is clearly unacceptable.

Attraction

It's important to make sure that your henchmen are castrated as soon as they are initiated. If they fall for the girl, you'll be in a whole heap of trouble. If they don't have to think about sex, their mind will be on violence, 100%. Because they have had their testicles removed, their testosterone levels will drop. Inject them regularly to avoid disappointment.

Love of mindless violence with no regard for personal safety

Henchmen need to be able to react to any situation. With violence. This is good for two reasons:

1. Thugs should always resort to killing the person who is mucking about with your plans.

2. In a heated melee, you should be able to escape un-scathed, leaving your henchmen to fight on regardless. If they are obsessed with their own safety, they'll be running too, leaving nobody to distract your attacker.

Lack of imagination

If your henchmen have imagination, they may try to think for themselves instead of following your orders. You do not pay these people to think. You are the evil genius, so you do all the thinking. Ask them what they think it would be like to fall off a cliff and hit nasty rocks. If they can't come up with an answer, they're in. (You will also know that they won't be afraid to fight around dangerous machinery, shark infested waters etc, as they are too stupid to imagine danger…)

Counting

It's important for your business that henchmen cannot count for two reasons:

1. Large numbers of armed guards should not intimidate your brutish entourage. If they don't know the odds, they won't care.

2. You can pay them less.

Wild fire

All thugs need the ability to spread hundreds of bullets in all directions. With their level of intelligence, you wouldn't expect them to be able to hit a dead elephant at point-blank range. (If they can shoot straight, and have passed the other tests, they are a rare find indeed.) For this reason, you need to make sure that they can hold down the trigger of a machine gun until they run out of bullets. Extra ammo isn't usually a problem, as they would either have been killed, or killed the enemy after the first salvo. Experiment with sticky tape behind the trigger, or pick thugs with arthritis in their fingers. The next thing to remember is that they will need to produce stupidly wide arcs of fire. Make them practise this random flailing on a plastic sheet smeared with butter.

The ability to drive badly

All henchmen need this skill in order to drive madly through a town square attracting the attention of police cars. Once they have crashed and exploded, the hero may be caught and slowed down by random policemen.

The boss is always right

If your henchmen ever question your insane logic, or even your apparently senseless outbursts, you should kill them straight away. That way, you'll always be able to gloat, laugh, scream or kill without ridiculous enquiries. NB: Questions detract from wide-eyed guffawing, don't let it happen!

Appreciation

Remember that your henchmen need your love and appreciation, or they will not feel valued as an employee. You can show your appreciation by not beating them every day.

You can let them pull the secret lever once in a while. Exactly what effect this will have will differ depending on your super-secret base of operations.

The last thing that you can do to show your appreciation of good thuggery is to promote a henchmen to the status of evil assistant. You should kill this person for failure every now and again so that your other employees get a chance to progress. The "dead man's shoes" ethos is very appropriate here.