Get Mean (1975)

Tony Anthony is The Stranger, a man dragged by a horse to a wind-swept ghost town where gypsies have apparently been waiting for his arrival.

They dump a large pile of coins in front of him and offer him all the money if he’ll return a princess (Diana Lorys) to her home in Spain where her people are fighting Barbarians for control of the countryside.

Being a businessman, The Stranger wants more. He wants $50,000. Once the gypsies agree to the price, he agrees to the mission.

So he’s off to Spain, princess in tow. But the war there isn’t going very well. The barbarians defeats the princess’s Moor army and sweep her off with them.

As for The Stranger … well, he hasn’t gotten his $50,000 yet. And now there’s a princess in trouble with the promise of a hidden treasure that will be at her disposal … if she survives to claim her rightful inheritence.

Of course Diego (Raf Baldassarre) wants that treasure too. So does his chief lieutenant, the hunchbacked, Shakespeare-quoting Sombra (Lloyd Battista) and his counselor, the gay Alfonso (David Dreyer).

Review:

By the time this film was released, the Spaghetti Western had been twisted this way and that with some unusal results. This has to rank among the strangest.

We’re barely nine minutes into the film, and our hero has been dropped in Spain, though it’s still his Western gunfighting skills that help him survive until the end.

Along the way, he’s turned black, nearly roasted like a pig and nearly killed — or at least castrated — by a female barbarian before she and her two colleagues have a change of heart and decide to fight over who gets to rape him instead.

Not that the evil deeds are one sided. At one point, The Stranger forces Alfonso to swallow a ball of dough as a message to his colleagues. Once he’s forced to poop out the ball of dough, they discover an unluckly charm called The Scorpion’s Sting, a harbinger of death.

Oh, The Stranger will eventually use real scorpions too, in a film that features plenty of action, some clever dialogue, but a bit too much absurdity.

Directed by:
Ferdinando Baldi

Cast:
Tony Anthony … The Stranger
Lloyd Battista … Sombra
Raf Baldassarre … Diego
David Dreyer … Alfonso
Diana Lorys … Princess Elizabeth Maria de Burgos
Mirta Miller … Morelia
Sherman Bergman … Viking
Raul Castro … Moor

Runtime: 90 min.

aka:
Vengeance of the Barbarians
Time Breaker
Beat a Dead Horse
Get Mean, the Dynamite Man

Memorable lines:

Spaniard: “We’re willing to pay any amount for her (the Princess’s) safe conduct to Spain?”
The Stranger: “Well I don’t know who you are. And I don’t know nothing about no barbarians. Hell, I don’t even know where this place Spain is you’re talkin’ about.”

Princess: “I command you to help my army!”
The Stranger: “And I command you to shut up, lady, cause you’re gettin’ on my nerves.”

Morelia: “Be careful.”
The Stranger: “Gypsy girl, my old lady never raised no dummies.”

The Stranger to Alfonso: “Little sister, you’re goin’ to find out that I’m the biggest god damned liar you ever met.”

The Stranger: “Now, when things are even up, a man really should fight fair. But, oh, when they just keep puttin’ it to ya, buddy, and they’re stompin’ on your ass, there’s only one way to fight. Get mean!”

The Stranger, to Diego: “Now any man who would try to roast a fella like a pig is trash. But you’re worse than trash. You’re garbage. Whew! Garbage, buddy.”

Trivia:

Director Fernando Baldi didn’t have — and couldn’t afford — enough extras for the battle scene early in the film. So he had his extras dress up as barbarians and filmed their charge, then had them switch customes and become Moors to film the charge by the opposite side.

This was the fourth and last of Tony Anthony’s “Stranger” films, which began in 1967 with the much more traditional “A Stranger in Town.” According to some reports, there were plans to have the Stranger do more globe trotting if this film was a success.

Anthony also wrote the script and served as producer, and there’s still a website dedicated to the film.

In an interview segment on that website, it’s suggested the fortress used in the film is the same one featured in “El Condor,” the 1970 Western starring Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.