Bloody Parrot (1981)

I'm not sure if the Bloody Parrot-legend is based on a real legend or just something from the imagination of the scriptwriter at Shaw Brothers. But if it's from his own mind, why didn't call it "Bloody Eagle" or... "Bloody Wolf", something cooler than parrot. But it's to late for a change now, and it just have to accept that Bloody Parrot is (for now) the best wuxia-style Hong Kong-horror I've seen. Yeah, it even beats Human Lanterns!

A wealthy and powerful man runs into the Bloody Parrot, which is more of warrior-demon with a parrot as a symbol and grants three wishes. But these wishes just turns into chaos and everybody in his household dies brutally! But before that happens the first wish is granted, an enormous amount of jewelery, disappears. Now the hunt for the treasure is on the way, but everyone dies trying to find it!

Of course a famous swordsman (Jason Pai Piao) get's involved in it and together with a coffin (where his dead friend, an angry constable, lies) he's arriving to the strange Parrot Brothel, a luxery bordello where the main whore also seems to have some weird secrets. Suddenly everyone in the city want's to kill the swordsman... and it leads him closer to the secret of the lost jewelery!

I'm not sure this story is totally correct, because it happens so much during this movie that it's hard to focus on something so trivial as the main storyline. There's A LOT of fighting, bloody limb-chopping fighting to. There a reason to fight in most scenes, and the fighting is great. Fun stuff with a lot of acrobatics, slow-motion, gore and the martial arts is top-notch. As with Human Lanterns it dosen't feel so much as a horror movie, but more of pure martial arts movie with some macabre details. Here we have some surprisingly graphic and disgusting autopsies which could be directly from an italian gore flick.

For me this movie has everything: gore, martial arts, blood, fantastic cinematography, great editing and it's never, never, never boring. Yes, a masterpiece. Without a doubt.