Get Mean

The fourth and last entry in an unknown and insignificant film series revolving around the rather annoying Tony Anthony as "The Stranger". Like the rest of the world, I haven't seen the previous three films, so I don't know if it's a trademark of the series, but "Get Mean" is a mixture of the genres: comedy, adventure and western. Well, actually, it's an attempt to mix genres but not a very successful one. It's not funny, not adventurous and a pretty miserable excuse for a western. The Stranger is "chosen" to escort a Spanish princess back to her homeland, but there he becomes entangled in a battle between Barbarians and Moors. During a lot of far-fetched and uninteresting twists, he also turns black (!) and must battle gay backstabbers and Shakespeare-obsessed Vikings. "Get Mean" is pretty boring and often comes across as amateur theater, complete with lousy costumes, bad make-up, tame action but an overload of stupid dialogues, and incompetent extras hectically running around in the background. Ferdinando Baldi's movies are always quite inept, but usually also very entertaining ("Blindman", "Just a Damned Soldier", ...). This is my least favorite film of his.

Here's a very strange one - A Western that barely takes place in America, seems to involve time-travel, ghosts and magic, and has a smart-ass, cowardly hero who sports a four-barreled shotgun. Somehow Ferdinando Baldi has bypassed the future trend of killing machine Eighties action stars like Arnie and Stallone and gone straight for the nineties-era non-action stars like Bruce Campbell. Nice one!

The Stranger, as he's called, is dragged into town by his horse while a silver orb looks on. After his horse suddenly dies, the Stranger finds the same orb held by a mystic woman who tells him he has to escort a princess back to Spain so she can prevent a war between Barbarians and Moors. Quite rightly demanding a cash reward and getting into a slapstick punch up with some Barbarians, The Stranger agrees to go.

Now, I'm not quite sure if time travel is involved, but The Stranger gets to Spain and witnesses a huge battle between the Barbarians and the Moors, resulting in a win for the Barbarians, the princess getting kidnapped, and The Stranger being hung upside down. We also get to meet our bad guys - the head Barbarian seems to thrive on violence and anger while his hunchbacked brother constantly quotes Shakespeare. Both are advised by an ultra-stereotypical gay guy.

The demented plot follows The Stranger as he seeks his payment and a hidden treasure, fights ghosts who make him howl like a dog and slap himself before turning him completely black from head to toe, fight various bad guys before getting tooled up for the explosive end of the film. There must have been quite a bit of budget behind this one too as there's a lot of good set design and huge crowds of extras.

I wasn't too sure about it when it started off (that being the slapstick fight) but I was one over by the general willingness for the film to weird and entertaining at the same time. Better than all those comedy westerns for sure.

Watching this "western" is certainly a unique experience. The plot revolves around the return of a Spanish princess from America to her native country Spain. To help her she enlists the aid of a reluctant hero (Tony Anthony).

It takes them only a minit of music and a dotted line on a map to reach their destination. Where they are just in time to witness a battle between the moors en the vikings. The vikings being the bad guys kidnap the princess immediately afterwards. The rest of the story involves a villainess hunchback who compares himself to Richard III, a treasure guarded by magic, an inbred member of the royal family and an aggressive vikingking.

With a combination of all these elements one can only laugh. Tony Anthony fails as a Clint Eastwood impersonator but that makes the movie only funnier. And it is a funny movie although the fun is mostly unintentional. Also one must admire a movie that tries so hard to be special.

This is an extremely bizarre movie that is still a great deal of fun. A cowboy delivers a beautiful princess to Spain for $1,000 and the promise of more. However, it is a strange Spain full of medieval Vandals and Moors fighting with swords, muskets and cannons. There are magical elements to the story that makes things even more outlandish. At one point the cowboy starts howling like a wolf. Later on, he turns black. It is still great fun to watch. Tony Anthony, once again, takes on incredible odds, and still wins!

I think this one is rated too low at 5.1. It's not nearly that bad. I agree with the comments that say that a lot comes down to what you expect from it. It's got enough SW chops to be called one of the genre. As to what it is best described as... It struck me that it's basically a Spaghetti Western version of a Shakespearean comedy.

Yeah, that's hard to explain without spoilers, so, I say, watch it! There is a new release in 2016 on DVD that is dubbed and has Italian subs. I'd prefer it the other way around, but this is odd enough that it might be better to not be reading the subtitles.

The minimum line requirement on these reviews is VERY tedious. Ever heard that brevity is the soul of wit? Guess not.