Get Mean

Now this one really is an oddity! The Spaghetti Western did throw up a few odd films (think Django Kill and its homosexual bandits, Blindman with its 50 wives and nudity, the circus troupes of Sabata, and Providence with its Chaplin-esq antics). But, my, if you thought they were weird, wait until you get a load of "Get Mean".

Tony Anthony returns as the Stranger, but rather than being a parody/rehash (depends on how you view it) of A Fistful of Dollars, this film involves our hero on a quest to Spain to escort a princess for money, amidst the battling Vikings and Moors. Proof if any that the Spaghetti boom was on its last legs, desperately seeking new ways to be innovative.

Anthony is very ham-fisted throughout, but I guess that is part of his charm in this genre. The rest of the cast are, in truth, fairly forgettable.

However strange this film may be (and believe me, it is strange), it remains watchable. Not as a western, but as an oddball art-flick.

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.

Thanks to schlefaz (see trivia) I had the chance to watch this trash movie on TV. And what an adventure... you see: no plot, no sense, no serious attempt to tell a decent story - it's just a series of brainless scenes, with a crazy score underneath.

From minute 1 (why is the "hero" dragged along by a horse? Why not... riding?) to minute 87 - you won't stop laughing hard - or crying, because you waste 87 minutes of your precious life!

Master of disaster Ferdinando Baldi (we know him!) - he obviously burned some money by directing this show. And yes: they must have taken it seriously - it's a serious film, with (mostly) serious actors, and even some big fighting scenes. They did they best, I guess - but in the end, it all falls apart. It's just one big black pot hole. Nearly every scene has aspects of weirdness or poor failure. And let's be honest: even in Italy 1976, nobody wanted to bring this catastrophe on cinema screens! And THAT means something! Italy, 1976....

So if you're into really bad bad movies that leaves you speechless in front of the TV screen - take this! A spaghetti incident....

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.

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.