Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		2.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Robin Redbreast Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 27, 2022

Note: This film is available on Blu-ray as a part of All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror.

All the Haunts Be Ours advertises itself as "the most comprehensive collection of its kind", which may initially beg the question as to "kind of what?". But the release also comes with a front cover sobriquet proclaiming it "a compendium of folk horror", which may then beg the next obvious question as to what exactly "folk horror" is. In that regard, this set begins with a fascinating and diverse documentary which has its own subtitle referencing folk horror, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, which provides a veritable glut of clips from international films which director (and this entire set's guiding light) Kier-La Janisse has assembled to help define the genre, but perhaps the best answer is to simply echo a certain Supreme Court Justice named Potter Stewart who was trying to decide a case involving supposed pornography, and who famously opined, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it. . ."

All the Haunts Be Ours goes out with an interesting archival television offering, the very first episode of England's Play for Today, an anthology series which also offered the broadcast debut of the companion piece on this disc, Penda's Fen. If Penda's Fen is almost a magical realist psychological drama, Robin Redbreast probably hews more closely to the time honored tradition of an outsider interloping into village life, and perhaps getting more than they bargained for. In this instance, and in a kind of cheekily "meta" way, the focal character is a writer for the BBC named Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), who "gets away from it all" to an isolated village where she has a house she's never spent time in.

This has a number of very strong ties to everything from Rosemary's Baby to The Wicker Man to perhaps most especially a Thomas Tryon novel I've cited several times in previous reviews which was adapted into the made for television film The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, but suffice it to say Norah finds herself ensconced in the so-called Old Ways, with vestiges of pagan deities perhaps closer to being resurrected than might initially be assumed.

Robin Redbreast Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Robin Redbreast is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. Severin's insert booklet states that this was "mastered from the BBC production tape master, the only surviving element". This is probably the shoddiest looking video presentation of the All the Haunts Be Ours set, though the rarity of this item probably helps to at least ameliorate the lack of quality. The show was evidently originally broadcast in color, but that tape was taped over (of course), and this is the only known survivor. You can easily see the deficits by even glancing at the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review, but I'd point out that things go from relatively bad to definitely worse late in the presentation, as evidenced by screenshot 9).

Robin Redbreast Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Things are at least somewhat better with regard to Robin Redbreast's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track. There's some prevalent background hiss which admittedly gets subsumed in outdoor scenes in particular where ambient environmental sounds may predominate, but there's also an intermittent buzz or hum that can be detected in ostensibly quieter moments. Dialogue still makes it through the gauntlet of time and tide reasonably well. Optional English subtitles are available.

Robin Redbreast Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with William Fowler and Vic Pratt, Curators and Authors of The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film & Television


• Interview with John Bowen (HD; 11:59)


• Short Film - The Sermon (HD; 11:33)

Robin Redbreast Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Robin Redbreast is another surprisingly provocative piece, and one which I suspect would never have made broadcast in the United States in 1970 for at least one salient reason. Technical merits here are what they are, and this probably should be seen as a historical curio "bonus feature". As such, and with the addition of some appealing supplements, Robin Redbreast comes Recommended.