Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 18, 2025

Note: This version of this film is available on Blu-ray as part of the Shawscope Volume Four collection from Arrow Video.

Things seem to have calmed down a little from the gauntlet I experienced toward the end of 2024 where it seemed I was getting a Shaw Brothers title (or several) in my review queue virtually daily. Arrow has been curating its immense Shawscope collections for a few years now, and they're helping to alleviate any perceived deficit in high definition presentations of the venerable studio's output with this fourth volume which aggregates sixteen more films from the Shaw Brothers canon (some of them previously released in other territories, though Arrow advertises new 2025 restorations for all of the films in the set). Arrow has packaged all of these volumes consistently, and this latest volume shares the same basic dimensions as its shelf mates (if you even have shelf space for such large boxes), and it also includes the wealth of bonus material that the previous releases from Arrow have offered.

For "rabid completists" who may want to peruse the immense prior volumes in this series from Arrow, please click on the following links:

Shawscope Volume One Blu-ray review

Shawscope Volume Two Blu-ray review

Shawscope Volume Three Blu-ray review

Kind of combining elements already seen in several of the preceding films in this fourth Shawscope volume, namely an emphasis on magic and folklore with occasional (?) quasi-exploitation elements like rampant nudity, with what at one point anyway was the Shaw Brothers' main calling card, namely wuxia films, Bloody Parrot is in some ways one of the most outrageously gonzo productions in this set. This may be a film where style is intentionally given predominance over substance, which is to say in short that nothing much makes sense in this narrative, and it's probably best to just sit back and revel in a procession of increasingly hallucinogenic vignettes.

The underlying foundation of Bloody Parrot is ostensibly simple, with Ye Ting-Feng (Jason Pai Piao) on the hunt for missing imperial jewels, a disappearance that seems to be linked in some way to mysterious deaths. That may indicate more coherence than is actually ever on screen, and as Ian Jane's kind of comical film notes mention, "it is better to approach this film, like many in this collection, as more of an experience than an attempt at rational storytelling". As some "trivia" notes included in Arrow's insert booklet also get into, this film has original source author tethers to Bat Without Wings, but this outing is even more surreal than that one, which is saying something.

Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bloody Parrot is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Arrow's almost overwhelming insert booklet lumps all the films together on its informational page about the transfers, as follows:

All sixteen films in this boxset are presented in their original aspect ratios (all 2.35:1 except for Bewitched, Hex After Hex and Seeding of a Ghost in 1.85:1) with their original Mandarin and/or Cantonese and/or English monaural soundtracks. Every effort has been made to present these films in their original and complete versions using the best materials available.

All sixteen films have been newly restored by Arrow Films in 2025, in collaboration with L'Immagine Ritrovata, Hong Kong Film Archive and Celestial Pictures. The original 35mm negatives for these films were scanned at L'Immagine Ritrovata Asia and restored in 2K resolution at L'Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna. Super Inframan, Oily Maniac, Battle Wizard, Black Magic, Black Magic Part 2, Hex, Hex Vs. Witchcraft, Hex After Hex and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star were graded at R3store Studios, London. Bewitched, Bat Without Wings, Bloody Parrot, The Fake Ghost Catchers, Demon of the Lute, Seeding of a Ghost and Portrait in Crystal were restored at Dragon DI, Wales. These restorations have used the entire film negative without resorting to the practice of "frame-cutting" resulting in the loss of film frames at each negative splice point.

The mono mixes were remastered from the original sound negatives at L'Immagine Ritrovata. Additional sound remastering was completed by Þorsteinn Gíslason. The audio synch will often seem loose against the picture, due to the fact that the dialogue and sound effects were recorded entirely during post-production, as per the production standards of the period.

All film materials supplied for these restorations were made available from the Hong Kong Film Archive via Celestial Pictures.

The American cut of Super Inframan, titled Infra-Man, is remastered using a composite of the newly restored Hong Kong version and selected excerpts from a 35mm US exhibition print. This print also featured a rare quadrophonic sound mix ("Stereo-Infra-Sound") that is featured here, for the first time on home video. The print, as well as 16mm TV spots and a 7" record with two radio spots, was scanned by Film-Tech Cinema Systems in Richardson, Texas. Special thanks to Lee Demarbre for granting us access to the 35mm print, and to Jarrod Varney for supplying the TV and radio spots.

The original camera negative for Bewitched is conformed to a censored version missing select scenes in the first two reels. When the film was originally remastered in high-definition by Celestial Pictures in 2007, these additional scenes were scanned from a lower-quality element as the negatives for them could not be located. When preparing for this new restoration, this element could not be located anymore either, so the scenes have been incorporated from the earlier HD master instead.

The original trailers were restored by Arrow Films from the original 35mm materials held at the Hong Kong Film Archive. Special thanks to King-Wei Chu and Denis-Carl Robidaux for donating and scanning additional trailers for Bat Without Wings and Bloody Parrot.

Bloody Parrot has one of the less appealing transfers in this set, with much grittier looking grain a lot of the time, and a lack of clarity that actually includes several out of focus moments (see screenshot 9 for an example). Generally speaking, while perfectly watchable and in fact quite decent looking a lot of the time in terms of palette suffusion and detail levels, this presentation has a noticeably fuzzier and blurrier overall appearance. There are some of the same kinds of anamorphic squeezes as show up in several of the other transfers, and while they are typically at the edges of the frame, on a couple of occasions they seem to afflict things more toward the center.

Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bloody Parrot is another film with just one audio track, a Mandarin language outing in LPCM Mono. There's some discernable background hiss and noise that can be largely masked by some of the crazy hyperbolic music and sound effects, but which tends to be more audible in "quieter" moments. As with several tracks in this volume, there's some slight thinness on the high end, but I'd rate is a minimal in this instance when stacked up against some of the tracks on other films. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional English subtitles are available.

Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary by Samm Deighan

Bloody Parrot Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This may not exactly be one of those "so bad it's good" outings, but it may well be "so weird it's good", at least for a certain class of, um, discerning cineaste. Video is a little less consistent looking here than in some of the other films in this set, but audio is generally fine and once again Samm Deighan provides an interesting commentary, for anyone who may be considering making a purchase.