Kung Fu Brothers in the Wild West (1973)

Chen and Dough are brothers engaged in a match to determine who will become master of a kung fu school in China.

They wind up letting the match become too violent, injuring one another, and are scolded for it.

Rather than resume another day, Dough travels to the American West, taking along their sister Ling.

Flash forward five years, and Dough is running a restaurant and trying to resist Ling’s urging to return to their homeland.

Then Chen shows up. He’s spent five years tracking them down.

After all, there’s a match to finish. Without that competition, dishonor will fall on the family and the kung fu school will have to close.

But Chen’s timing isn’t the best … at least not in that regard.

An outlaw gang led by a man named Steve (William Berger) has taken over the town where Dough lives.

And he’s got a fast gun (Donal O’Brien) and his own kung fu expert (Dragon) to enforce his will.

Review:

If you aren’t into kung fu movies, the simple novelty of seeing Berger and O’Brien in one isn’t going to make this worth your time.

If you’re looking for Spaghetti Western fun … well, this film is sure to make you chuckle a few times.

Just check out the attack on the town by Steve and his gang. The defenders don’t even have the common sense to go inside and shoot through windows. Or, for crying out loud, at least hide behind a barrel.

But the film was released during the kung fu craze of the 1970s, so it likely had its fans.

It might be the only Spaghetti Western in which coins are turned into weapons, flung by kung fu experts so that they embed themselves in a gunslinger’s body — most often the forehead, making them a rather deadly weapon.

And the final fight takes up more time and covers more territory than most climatic showdowns in the Wild West.

Directed by:
Man Yi Yang
as George Bange

Cast:
William Berger … Steve
Jason Pai Piao … Chen
Donal O’Brien … Don
Kao Kang Thompson … Dragon
Tang Chin Ho … Dough
Rose Marie Lindt … Elaine
Winnie Tang … Ling
as Winnie Pei Nei
Po Chih Leo … Leung Po-Chih
Sally Leh … Sa La Leh

Also with: Attilio Dottesio, Tony Liu Jun-Guk, Ang Saan, Joe Chan, Wu Choon Hu, Tang Kwoksze, Chin-Ku Lu, Lee Wan-Chun

Runtime: min.

aka:
Kung Fu nel pazzo west
Man from Golden City
Golden City
Master Killers

Music: Franco Bracardi

Memorable lines:

Steve shoots a pole about to be thrown at him into shreds.
Kung Fu instructor: “You have to learn to do that with your hands.”

Ling, objecting to spending the last five years in the West: “Besides, we meet no other Chinese here, except the dead ones.”

Don, interrupting the telegraph operator summoning reinforcements to a town under attack by Steve and the gang: “Go on. We need more people for the funeral.”

Chen to Ling of Dough: “All men have rules that they live by. He’s not allowed to back down, and he knows it now that I’ve found him.”

Trivia:

* If you’ve never seen this and would like to, it’s one of dozens of kung fu films available as part of the Wu Tang Collection on YouTube.

* Jason Pai Piao has about 100 film and TV credits and was still active as an actor into the 2010s.

* And, yep, this film opens with a scene of Berger, head of the outlaw gang, taking kung fu lessons.