The 2020 German Blu-ray of Dario Argento’s debut giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is uncut and includes English, German and Italian audio options, but no English subtitles (in fact, there are no subs at all).

The Packaging:

This single-disc edition comes in an Amaray case, the artwork is the same on both sides of the sleeve, the reverside is just free from the blue “FSK-16” age restriction label.

The image:

Colours are pleasant, perhaps a little over-saturated when compared to the previous home video presentations. Film grain looks natural and very well-resolved. The level of detail is impressive and there are no compression issues. Could the transfer be the same one that’s been used for the Arrow blu-ray?

The Disc Menu:

The disc starts with a menu screen for trailers of three PIDAX releases. These SD trailers are newly-created, sloppily edited affairs, none of them Argento-related.

Fairly boring main menu offers audio selection and the sub-menu lets you navigate the main film via eight chapter stops.

The extras:

• original German-language cinema release cut of the film, taken from a shoddy SD master. This grubby, letterboxed and pretty much unwatchable mess is a reminder of how awful the older German DVD presentations of the film looked.
• a slideshow of the film’s German lobby cards. This is the only enjoyable extra in HD. Nothing grounbreaking, but colourful and brief.
• three international trailers for the main feature in standard def.

The 2020 PIDAX single Blu-ray edition of Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is English-friendly offers the classic 1970s Italian thriller in a decent hi-def transfer but is thin on extras.