The Meanest Men in the West (1978)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Dull western is actually two episodes of "The Virginian" from the 1960s, one starring Charles Bronson and the other starring Lee Marvin, edited together and released theatrically almost 20 years later. The episodes are connected in that Marvin and Bronson are supposed to be half brothers, although they didn't appear together in their respective episode and their stories not originally connected. The only reason I wanted to see this film is that one of the two episodes was written and directed by the great Samuel Fuller ("The Big Red One," "The Steel Helmet," "Shock Corridor," etc.), but you'd barely notice when watching this routine TV western. There are flashes where you can see seeds of something better, such some basic story concepts (Fuller wrote and directed the Lee Marvin episode), Fuller's usual knack for action, and, of course, Bronson and Marvin. However, it's all undone by cheap television production values, such as cheap sets, bad photography, and painful overuse of stock footage. Marvin is good, but he seems to just be going through the motions, as does Fuller. Really, there's nothing to recommend here unless you're a Fuller, Marvin, or Bronson completionist.

I wanted to give this a shot because when I read that it was two episodes of The Virginian combined to make a "movie" I thought the first part would have Marvin and the other part would have Bronson. I had seen this done before with "Man from U.N.C.L.E" movies, two Gemini Man episodes together in "Riding with Death", and a few drive in flicks like "The Doomsday Machine, and "They Saved Hitler's Brain". The results are usually not very good but I figured with two legends like Bronson and Marvin it would still be something decent. Little did I know that instead of some footage to tie the two episodes together that instead they would cut scene by scene the two together, and also it seems, with stock footage from a dozen other films. I had to stop watching pretty early in when I saw random Union Calvary soldier footage in with lots of wagon trail footage. The telescope trick was a riot (and lame). If you like really insulting to your intelligence entertainment (to laugh at) then you may be interested in this, otherwise see it for the curiosity and don't stay too long or you may get angry at the creators for making something so horrible. I think this was made for overseas audiences where English is not the first language. 1 of 10.

*Spoiler/plot- 1962, Two murderous brothers are pitted each other in this story of hatred and revenge. They are on the run from the Law and each other. They collide when psychotic bad man Marvin attempts to settle a life-long feud with his equally deadly brother, Bronson. After a series of hair-raising public crimes like cattle rustling, train robberies, kidnaps, gunfights, ambushes and personal betrayals; the two outlaws face-off for the final time.*Special Stars- Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Lee J Cobb, James, Dury.*Theme- Bad men never really win.*Based on- Cain and Abel biblical myth.*Trivia/location/goofs- A disappointingly cheap Universal 'composite' patch work film made up from archive footage film clips from a NBC TV episode of 'The Virginian' and a good Fox feature film, 'The Return of Frank James'. Huge plot holes abound in this film's story. The best action scenes were taken from other projects and saved the filmmakers production money. Filmed from the back 'doubles' were used to match the patchwork clip shots in the scene action to make this file footage trick to work effectively. It doesn't. In the Bronson featured bank robbery scenes, you can clearly see that Bronson was strangely matted into a bank interior background. His head image outline was 'vibrating' due to the bad EFX processing to accomplish this. *Emotion- A somewhat forgettable western with a stellar cast made up of disjointed archive footage clips taken from other better Universal media projects. It's really too hard to follow the paper-thin simplistic plot in this movie by this money saving trick. Also, an overuse of stars reaction in single scenes to move the film along makes this film's pacing very tedious and destroys the continuity of the plot. Combined with the film's small explanatory prequel on the brother's early hard family life in the film's beginning, the viewer gets confused and bored from caring much about the characters.The director Sam Fuller should be ashamed of this one. Marvin looks and weakly acts like he never left the much better John Ford film, 'Who Shot Liberty Valance?" of the same time period. Bronson disappoints the viewer with his flat performances. All this, combined with the stolen action film sequences was a confused bore. You are better off missing this 'mean' turkey of a western.

A Sam Fuller-directed and scripted episode of the TV show The Virginian starring Lee Marvin and Lee J. Cobb is cobbled together with another episode (I assume) starring Charles Bronson to create this dreadful mess. Bizarre voice-overs, misplaced shots, and freeze-frames attempt to create the new plot. Utterly ludicrous and a disservice to a great filmmaker.