Around the time this movie was made, the spaghetti western was just about on its last legs. Also, the craze for kung fu movies was starting to die out as well. So it must have seemed logical for the Italians and Hong Kongers to team up and make a movie that mixed both genres (though this movie was not the first to do so.) Though it's perhaps inevitable that a mix of genres would have mixed results. Certainly, the movie has solid production values, and its light-hearted nature is welcome after so many serious spaghetti westerns and kung fu epics. There's also some nudity, unusual for both genres at this time. But the movie feels kind of drawn out, taking its time when the pacing should have been a bit more snappy. Even more surprising is that there isn't a terrible amount of kung fu in the movie, though this may have been because the choreography and direction of the martial arts fights are sub par. Also, the two leads don't manage to generate that much chemistry, though the language barrier might explain this. I'm not saying this is an awful movie, but it is disappointing. If you want to see a good spaghetti western / kung fu mix, watch "The Fighting Fists Of Shanghai Joe" instead.

Lo Leih's uncle apparently swindles a Chinese warlord and heads to California, where he's accidentally killed trying to stop Lee Van Cleef's after hours bank robbery of his safe. Leih saves Van Cleef from a hanging in order to help retrieve the stolen fortune, using parts of a treasure map tattooed on the backsides of several prostitutes!One amusing scene has one of the tattooed girls, European sexpot Erika Blanc, revealed to be wearing a chastity belt put on by her puritanical husband, forcing Lee Van Cleef to pick her lock!An international co-production between Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers, along with Spanish, Italian, and American producers, Blood Money is a sometimes funny, sometimes pretty silly, and all-around okay film, though not nearly as good as other east-meets-west flicks like The Fighting Fists Of Shanghai Joe, Red Sun, or the TV series "Kung Fu".The films where the Shaw Brothers worked with studios in the west to introduce Kung Fu elements to different settings and genre's were always pretty neat, the most famous probably being The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, made with Hammer Films.

"Blood Money", also known as "The Stranger and the Gunfighter", is an interesting combination of gun play and flying fists. Lee VanCleef may not be at the top of his game, but the unusual and entertaining story makes up for any edge he might have lost. I found more humor here than in any of the "Trinity" films. If you look at the entertainment value alone, I would say this is about on a par with "Death Rides a Horse" or "Kid Vengeance". It is definitely inferior to "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", "For a Few Dollars More", and "The Big Gundown". Overall, I would recommend "Blood Money" as a must see for Lee VanCleef fans. - MERK

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.