Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
To start out Arrow’s massive Shawscope Volume Four set that they recently released, we dig into a film that is best described as “Spaceballs from the Shaw Brothers”. A quirky little sci-fi comedy that took very obvious inspiration from Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, along with other popular science fiction tropes of the era, and blended them into a wacky Chinese comedy that is better “experienced” than actually dissected.

Back in 1983, Shaw Brothers had sort of fallen on hard times due to a paradigm shift in the industry. For years, they dominated the period piece martial arts landscape, pumping out hit after hit after hit, with their audiences loving them for it. But the late 80s and the Bruce Lee revolution had come about, and now Hong Kong fans were watching Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and the rise of the Golden Age of martial arts cinema. Audiences were getting bored with the cliched Wu Xia tropes and obviously made up period pieces that capitalized on over-stylized choreography and wire fu. So, in order to jump in on the changes taking place, Shaw Brothers decided to go in for a goofy sci-fi sex comedy instead of their typical period piece fare. And while I applaud them for changing things up, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (not to be confused with the Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung masterpiece, Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars of the same time period) is a bizarre mess that is almost better experienced than it is explained.

Our film revolves around a group of people dealing with alien abductions, criminal enterprises, and typical sex buddy tropes, all thrown into a single pot and then stirred around in hopes of making something special arise out of it. However, the film instead is almost a set of vignettes, with some sequences coming across as a sex comedy (complete with jokes about incest, alien “probing” and even a silly Marilyn Monroe scene just to yuck up the sexscapades gags.

But even crazier is the 2nd half of the film when the two main characters decide to enter the spaceship that has landed nearby from the UFO sighting, which turns into a LITERAL clone of Spaceballs, with lightsaber fights, “limp” lightsaber gags, and of course ghosts and aliens thrown together for good measure. You have to be a mathematical genius to tie together all of the plot points in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and even then, I think it would stress out even Steven Hawking from the sheer quantity of logical leaps it takes to get from the opening scene to the closing.

Smoking crack, a literal homage to classic sci-fi of the day, or simply a frustrated exercise in trying to somehow tie into the zeitgeist of the day. Who knows, really? All I can tell you is this: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is a whacked-out Shaw Brothers comedy with very little martial arts, but plenty of comedy, hot girls, alien weaponry, and attempts at making a special effects extravaganza that is more experience than anything else. It’s 1983’s version of a “vibe” film, where you feel the groove more than spend time and effort analyzing it as a serious film.




Not Rated by the MPAA / Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Taken from a new master struck from Arrow last year, the 35mm OCN was scanned at L’Immagine Ritrovata Asia and restored in 2K for this release. And while Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Star isn’t going to look like a Hollywood blockbuster, it certainly looks nice for a film of its ilk. Grain is thick and fairly heavy, but overall, the image is clean enough with a lot of effort gone into the special effects. Colors are a bit garish and out there at times, while other instances look a bit bland and sandy-looking. But at the end of the day is a solid-looking image that shows no major issues outside of the low-budget filming style. I did notice a few blurry and out-of-focus shots here and there, but the disc handles it all quite nicely.









Audio:

Arrow gives us the film in the traditional Mandarin and Cantonese audio options (both in LPCM Mono), but they give us a third audio track that features some Mandarin in the Cantonese track. According to Arrow, this was due to one minute of footage being removed from the Cantonese audio track as it referenced Deng Xiaopen (the leader of the Chinese government at the time), but was kept in for the Taiwanese Mandarin release. Thus, a third audio mix was created out of the Cantonese mix, with just that 1 minute of dialogue put back in in Mandarin.

Comparing all three tracks, I could find no real differences outside of the dialect changes. Both are fairly clean and clear, with only minor hisses and sharpness to the dialogue, as expected for the time period. Special effects (sound-wise) are reasonably clear, although there is some harsh sharpness to the edges of them that was indicative of the time. Overall, a solid low-budget track.





Extras:

• Cantonese Version
• Mandarin Version
• Cantonese Version with Additional Mandarin Scene
• Commentary by Frank Djeng
• Interview with Alex Cheung
• Victor Fan on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
• Theatrical Trailer (Cantonese)
• Theatrical Trailer (Mandarin)

Final Score: ​

If you take anything away from this review/viewing, it’s that the Shaw Brothers, back in the 80s, were absolutely going for broke in hopes of surviving a changing marketplace. They had survived for decades on their well worn period piece tropes, but with audiences wanting more Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan that The 5 Deadly Venoms, they went completely gonzo during the 1980s in hopes of making themselves different. And you can’t get much more different than 1983’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The Blu-ray looks and sounds good, and there are some moderate extras on board. So for those looking for a silly time, this may just hit the spot.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: James Yi Lui, Cherie Chung, David Lo, Tim Nam Tam
Directed by: Kwok-Ming Cheung
Written by: John Au, Lawrence Cheng, Kwok-Ming Cheung
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 AVC
Audio: Cantonese: LPCM Mono, Mandarin LPCM Mono
Subtitles: English
Studio: Arrow Video
Rated: NR
Runtime: 92 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: December 9th, 2025

Recommendation: Silly Watch