Get Mean (1975) User Reviews

1976: A Spaghetti Oddity

[marc-366 · 5/10 · 4 April 2005]

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.

There's a reason this one's obscure -- it's terrible

[goods116 · 3/10 · 21 July 2020]

Seemingly has potential with great sets and costumes, but it's totally uninteresting with a plot that makes little sense. The hero is also pretty ineffective, getting captured numerous times and getting rescued or released, wash, rinse, repeat. There are better type of this genre, skip it.

Eccentric ideas, mediocre execution

[ofumalow · 5/10 · 15 April 2024]

This curious very late spaghetti western really goes out on a conceptual limb, sending Tony Anthony's rascally Wild West "Stranger" across the Atlantic with a Spanish princess. In Europe he somehow gets mixed up with both Elizabethan-era Spaniards and Viking-style "barbarians," while another character seems to parody Shakespeare's Richard III.

It's goofy stuff that has been compared to "Army of Darkness," and does bear a superficial resemblance in its goofy quasi-historical incongruities. But while the movie does have a sense of humor, it's pretty crude--rather than absurdist, which would much better suit this out-there concept. It's also particularly hard now to take the simpering old-school screaming-queen stereotype played by the star's brother.

Anthony's sort of proto-Lebowski wiseacre carries things to an extent, and the film has an impressive scale at times, particularly since the Euro western genre was way past its commercial peak in 1975. But the direction by a mostly undistinguished toiler in Italian B movies (he did make a handful of decent giallos, straight-faced spaghettis and other genre entries) doesn't rise to the occasion, and beyond its premise nor does the script. This is one of those enterprises that sounds so deliciously nutty it can hardly go wrong...until you actually watch it, and realize it's not nearly as much fun as it sounded.

I've seen contrary information on the film's commercial fate, some indicating it ran into distribution problems, others indicating it made $10 million (which would have been a lot then, and seems highly improbable). I suspect the truth is that it didn't do well, because apparently Anthony had hoped to kick off a whole new series of "Stranger" films. Instead, he never made another--which suggests financiers didn't want to take the risk.

no plot, no cry

[ecom-bkl · 2/10 · 10 September 2021]

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....

What is this?

[todesnudel · 1/10 · 11 September 2021]

No, seriously. What the hell is this? Usually I mark my reviews as spoilers, but this is unnecessary here, as it simply isn't possible for me to spoil this movie to anyone, because I haven't got the slightest idea what the hell happened.

Some stranger gets the mission to bring a Princess back to Spain, so they can fend off the barbarians roaming the country. He is offered $10,000 for it but he demands a much higher sum. It's never really agreed upon on screen but apparently they settle for $50,000. During the travel to Spain a narrator voice explains to us that the stranger "travels back in time with every mile traveled" (or something to that extend). Why? It isn't explained. The whole premise doesn't make sense. Okay, this is set in some alternative reality, but this alternative reality isn't explored in the slightest. Strange things happen and the viewer is left to figure out what this is about.

Back in Spain the Barbarians battle against the English, the stranger and the Princess are caught. The stranger says "you can have her for $50,000 because she is crazy and she isn't even a real princess". What the...? Some kind of businessman he is. Of course the baddies just kidnap the princess and leave the stranger to die. But he is saved by some unknown woman, brought back to the castle where the King of Spain(?) is on his death bed, but out stranger just demands getting paid because he brought the Princess back. Wow, what an a-hole.

Then it gets some more weird scenes, everyone tries to betray everyone else and in the end the viewer is none the wiser because this movie is boring, awful to watch, and utterly pointless.

Explosion of bad ideas

[Mikelikesnotlikes · 3/10 · 23 April 2017]

3 is a strange number to choose as a vote. It implies that the film was bad but it had some (one or two) redeeming qualities (or maybe a single laugh). Although, in this case, I'm unsure what that quality was.

I like spaghetti westerns and chose to watch GET MEAN along these lines. Since the wife was having a sleep I figured I'd get away with watching it alone, but I was sprung not long after it started so I had the embarrassment of her incredulous looks to cope with.

It is not a good film. I suspect the director was drunk, his unsupervised crew raided the props shed while stoned, and three competing writers fell down the stairs together and got their screen plays mixed up.

It starts as a western and quickly escalates into the absurd. Somehow a fight with Vikings in a wild west ghost town, occurs after a witch tells the main character to escort a Spanish princess somewhere. Along the way there are Goths, Huns, Spanish conquistadors, a treasure hunt, more witches, a flaming gay dude, a rich hunchback, and an incoherent story-line so loosely tied together you need a really forgiving imagination to keep up.

The acting is atrocious and Post-production looks like an independent interpretation of the footage with no consultation with the director.

They spent a lot of money on pyrotechnics. Maybe that's where I got the 3 from.

Your credibility will suffer if you get caught watching this crap.

"The men are all women and the women are all men"

[Bezenby · 7/10 · 5 September 2018]

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.

There's paella in my spaghetti!

[Coventry · 3/10 · 15 March 2020]

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.

something different

[rust-7 · 7/10 · 6 October 2002]

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.

Not your average spaghetti western

[spider89119 · 9/10 · 25 February 2007]

This movie is a lot of fun, and deserves more credit than it gets. It is quite unique among westerns, or even spaghetti westerns. It's so odd, in fact, that it really defies categorization.

Though it is without question a gloriously over-the-top spaghetti western, it actually relates more closely to "Army of Darkness." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Sam Raimi was influenced by this film before he directed that great third installment in the "Evil Dead" series. In this film, Tony Anthony plays his usual role of "the stranger" (kind of a "man-with-no-name' type of character). We learn right away that there is something supernatural going on here as the movie opens with the stranger being dragged by his horse into a ghost town. On the way there, they pass a strange silver orb, then when they get there, the horse has a heart attack and dies as the town bell tolls unexplainedly. Anthony walks into a building where he meets a witch who has the same silver orb at the table where she sits. He finds out he's been summoned to escort a Spanish princess back to Spain and help her regain her throne from "barbarian" invaders who appear to be from another time. This all happens in the first five minutes! I don't want to give away too much of the story, so I'll just say that the stranger's tasks are to deal with the barbarians, rescue the princess, find a treasure that is guarded by ghosts, and collect money that was promised to him by the witch. The movie is quite comical and full of slapstick, and just like Ash in "Army of Darkness," the stranger unloads a huge can of whoop-ass on an army of foes. I would love to see the plot of this movie "borrowed" for a sequel to the Evil Dead series. Ash could once again be sent back in time, but this time to the old west where he would be the stranger. Change the treasure to the Necronomicon, have it guarded by Deadites, and bam you've got Evil Dead 5! They wouldn't even have to change much of the dialog as most of the stranger's lines would be perfect for Bruce Campbell as Ash.

Tony Anthony is great, as usual, in this one. He's like the Rodney Dangerfield of spaghetti westerns in that he doesn't get the respect he deserves. Eastwood's "man-with-no-name" may be the king of "cool," but Tony Anthony's "stranger" is more of a character, and just as tough. The other actors and actresses in the film do an excellent job also. I especially liked the character of "Sambra," a crazy Hunchback who thinks he's the reincarnation of Richard III.

This movie isn't for everyone. If you go into it thinking it is just a wacky late-era spaghetti western, and try to fit it into that mold, you will think it is trying too hard, and will probably find it to be just slightly amusing and nothing more. But if you can understand and appreciate the film for what it really is, and especially if you've enjoyed "Army of Darkness," you should definitely enjoy this one.

The good, the weird and the strange

[BandSAboutMovies · 6/10 · 19 August 2020]

Tony Anthony played The Stranger in four films - Stranger in Town, The Stranger Returns, The Silent Stranger and this film - plus he's also in the Zatoichi by way of Italy film Blindman (Ringo Starr is in it!) and wrote, produced and starred in Comin' At Ya! and Treasure of the Four Crowns, movies that'd start a short 3D boom which ended with Anthony claiming that he made an estimated $1 million worth of lenses before Jaws 3D, the film that ended the trend.

This movie is just crazy - closer to a fantasy movie than a Western - and has no care at all about the fact that it doesn't follow any rules at all. It's directed by Ferdinando Baldi, who also made the Mark Gregory-starring Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission.

The Stranger gets dragged into a ghost town by his horse, who promptly dies. That;s when a family of gypsies pays him to escort Princess Elizabeth Maria de Burgos (Diane Lorys, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll) back to Spain. There, the Stranger does battle with Vikings, Moors, barbarians, ghosts, a bill and a hunchback. That's when he lives up to the alternate title - The Stranger Gets Mean - and lets the guns and dynamite do his talking.

Raf Baldassarre is in this, who you may have seen in everything from Hercules In the Haunted World and Eyeball to plenty of Westerns like Dakota Joe, The Great Silence, Sartana Kills Them All, Arizona Went Wild ... and Killed Them All! and even played Sabata in Dig Your Grave Friend ... Sabata's Coming. He's also in both of Luigi Cozzi's incredbly entertaining films based on Greek myth, Hercules and The Adventures of Hercules.

Morelia is played by Mirta Miller, who somehow unites so many film genres that I love - HBO After Dark semi-sleaze (Bolero), Mexican wrestling films (Santo vs. Dr. Death), giallo (Eyeball), shark movies (The Shark Hunter), sword and sorcery (Battle of the Amazons) and Spanish horror (Vengeance of the Zombies, Count Dracula's Great Love and Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf).

So yeah. An Italian Western with a four-barrelled shotgun carrying hero traveling through time who doesn't respect the princess he's trying to save. If this sounds like Army of Darkness at all to you, please remember that it came out 17 years before that movie.

A lot of crossovers in this atypical (and somehow chaotic) western

[alucinecinefago · 6/10 · 16 August 2020]

The following review is an extract from the book "Italo-Western and more...: A filmic guide", which is now available on Amazon.

"An unusual and unclassifiable product, which in the context of western film combines genres such as sword and sorcery with horror - all full of anachronisms and with touches of surrealist comedy in the style of Monty Python. Although the theme is not very original (the main character's mission is to protect a princess and find a treasure), the approach and context in which the story takes place is very original indeed: From the Wild West we go to (medieval?) Spain; in the same film we have a gunman who, armed with his colt, has to face a horde of barbarian warriors with huge swords and horned helmets; likewise, María's companions seem to have come out of a chapter of "Curro Jiménez" (Spanish TV series from the late ´70s, about a Robin-Hood-like bandit), dressed in the style of the Andalusian bandits of the early 19th century."

Fusilli Pasta

[leelacade · 8/10 · 11 May 2016]

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.

Not sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed it!

[moran-78845 · 8/10 · 28 January 2018]

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!

A really strange spaghetti western!

[Wizard-8 · 15 April 2003]

Once again, Tony Anthony (one of the least charismatic spaghetti western cowboys of the genre) rides the range.... though this time in Spain... and encountering Vikings (!) and Moors(!) It's played somewhat straight, though there are some broad attempts at humor (such as a embarrassingly unfunny gay character.) There are some impressive visuals, clearly showing this movie wasn't cheap - kind of surprising when you consider the spaghetti western was considered all but dead by European producers at the time. But despite the money spent, and the absolute goofiness of the premise, it's just as dull as Anthony's other spaghetti westerns. It's just another part of the mystery as to why Anthony managed to be so popular in Europe.