Pendez-le par les pieds

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.