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.

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.

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.