8/10
A funny & enjoyably silly spaghetti Western kung-fu comedy
23 March 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Okay, here's a delightfully oddball and inspired handy-dandy combo genre hybrid: a totally goofy and cheerfully low-brow tongue-in-cheek comedic Italian spaghetti Western romp crossed with a swiftly chopping and kicking martial arts fight-ridden Hong Kong actionfest, shot on location in Spain, done in collaboration with the Shaw Brothers and directed by tireless exploitation flick director supreme Antonio Margheritti.

The blithely dopey plot centers on an amusingly unlikely partnership between boozy ne'er-do-well drifter outlaw Lee Van Cleef (doing a disarmingly dippy send-up of his redoubtably stern'n'steely Sergio Leone tough guy sharpshooter persona) and smart, amiable Chinese fish-out-of-water karate master Lo Lieh (the star of the original breakthrough chopsocky hit "The Five Fingers of Death"), who trek across the wild'n'woolly Old West in search of a fortune in gold. Naturally, there's a catch -- and it's a hilariously bawdy one at that: individual parts of the treasure map are tattooed on the lovely bottoms of four luscious young ladies. The fact that three of said beauteous damsels are played by sexy Eurobabe scream queens Erica Blanc of "The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave," Femi Bunussi of "Strip Nude for Your Killer," and the always enticing Patty Shepard of "The Witches' Mountain" -- the latter portrays a couple of radically contrasting Russian twin sisters (a classy rich woman and her kittenishly lascivious prostitute sibling, respectively) -- only makes matters that much more entertainingly tacky and raunchy in comparable measure. Funniest scene: Van Cleef croaks out "Rye Whiskey" in a hoarsely off-key voice as he's about to be hung in the town square. Sure, it's really dumb and unsophisticated, but the energetically asinine fun's still quite enjoyable all the same.
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