Get Mean

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Audience Member A very strange finale to "The Stranger" series starring Tony Anthony. By 1976, the Spaghetti Western was on its last legs and there were a lot of "Sunset Spaghetti Westerns" like Keoma with sombre stories set in decaying Western towns with Leonard Cohen-esque ballads sung in the background. This is not one of those films. The Stranger started out as a rip-off of Clint Eastwood's "Man with no Name" character but by the final film in the series our hero finds himself in a frontier ghost town were gypsies hire him to return their princess (Diana Lorys looking a lot like Sophia Loren here) back home to Spain. Once in Spain, the Stranger is confronted with Vikings, Moors, vicious Barbarians, evil spirits, a raging bull, and a diabolical Shakespeare-quoting hunchback (co-star and co-writer Lloyd Batista). A put-upon Stranger suffers several humiliating encounters and rough treatment at the hands of his enemies before he decides to "get mean" with his arsenal of guns and dynamite. Only the Stranger seems to come from the 19th Century, everyone else is decked out like something from the Middle Ages or Renaissance. One wonders if producer Anthony and director Ferdinado Baldi had found a bunch of castles in Spain and a bunch of props and costumes left over from movies like El Cid and made this bizarre film which is pretty strange. Nineteenth century Spain did not resemble this film in real life but why let history get in the way of an enjoyable if farcical Spaghetti Western. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/24/23 Full Review Audience Member The spaghetti western genre was on its last leg going into the late 70's and filmmakers frantically tried new ideas as a desperation to keep the films fresh and interesting. Some westerns went too far trying to make something new and different and Get Mean falls in this category by taking the spaghetti western in to extreme absurdity. Our film opens atmospherically with our "stranger" (Tony Anthony) being dragged by a horse down a dusty valley while tied to the back. Once the horse arrives in a windy ghost town it drops over dead and our stranger stumbles into a bar which happens to have a handful of people who take him in and feed him. It's only 5 minutes into the movie and I am already going WTF. They offer him 50 thousand dollars to take a princess back to Spain (supposedly we are in America) so she can lead her people to defeat "barbarians" taking over her kingdom. Suddenly a group of Vikings break into the bar and our stranger takes them out. He agrees to take our princess back to Spain but once they arrive in Spain, she gets kidnapped by some barbarians after a huge battle that is no less than 10 minutes long! Still wanting his money he pulls a Yojimbo and starts playing sides against each other until the film falls completely apart with incoherency. Nothing makes a lick of sense in this film as it flows poorly from one absurd sequence to another. In one scene we have our stranger entering into a haunted church and starts literally getting slapped around by a ghost, then cut to him in a cave and suddenly an explosion occurs, cut to him emerging on the surface again completely pained black due to the explosion and then gets chased by an angry bull, then cut one more time to him falling back in the cave. The film has no flow yet it's like a train wreck and one can't keep their eyes off of it. Our villains even attempt to roast our stranger for dinner for Christ sake! Tony Anthony (my friend Bill thinks his name is hilarious as it is literally "Tony Tony") definitely wins the award for the most bizarre spaghetti western star in Italy as all this western team-ups with director Ferdinando Baldi are all strange. He's definitely no Clint Eastwood, Franco Nero or the likes but he does have a charm about him and he adds a lot of humor and funny one liners to the character. I like Tony Tony and he definitely kept my attention to the stitched together plot. The tone of this film is quite bizarre and it's a mish-mash of genre's with the spaghetti western mold. The tone actually reminds me a lot of Army of Darkness and it makes me wonder if Sam Raimi somehow was able to see this film before getting inspiration for his cult classic. It's just a damn shame the plot is so incoherent! Fans of bizarre alternative cinema will definitely want to hunt this strange flick down. Bonus Rant: At the beginning of the film it is shown that strange silver orbs "overlooking" our stranger as he is drug into town and they make an appearance at the end also. The orbs got me got me interested but the damn film explains nothing about them! They could video cameras for aliens overlooking our stranger for all I know! Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Audience Member If more than 50% of high school students truly can't locate Europe on a map, blame this little-seen noodle western in which a drifter in the Old West squares off against marauding Huns. Them bitches probably caught this shit on UHF and it rotted their brains. Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 02/06/23 Full Review Audience Member It got kinda slow, but there's nothing like it. A western with Vikings! Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/15/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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