All the positive talk about Eyewitness Productions being the second coming of ZFX in terms of snuff fantasies might have been premature. After a very impressive debut with Deadly Laundry, I'm disappointed to say that their newest tape, Guilty, is a big step down.
Not to say it's bad, it's just not well made. The descriptions on the site are accurate. A woman is abducted off the street, taken to a lair where she is tortured with electric shock to confess she is a prostitute, then hanged to death. Sounds good to me. Except the way the action is covered is very pedestrian. Most of the shots are filmed from a distance away, basically cutting between two long shots, almost like a security camera. My biggest problem? Olivia Simon is a beautiful woman. Then why do the filmmakers only shoot her in close up just a handful of times, and then for only for a few seconds at most? The close ups in the production are used only as cutaways between two boring camera setups, where the viewer (well, me anyway) is practically screaming for someone to move the camera in. This is a sharp contrast to their earlier first tape that I reviewed last week and praised for the way they filmed much of the action in close up, where you were right in there watching her suffer.
My other problem was that this seemed really padded, even more so than the much longer, earlier tape. Or maybe it was just me getting impatient, waiting for the good stuff to happen. Ironically, about the only time we get a good look at Olivia is right at the very end, where they show numerous tight shots of her dead body, but by that time, I didn't really care. On the positive side, the hanging illusion in this one is even more convincingly shot than in Deadly Laundry. And this one is inexplicably spoken in English, which surprised me because the first tape was in some other language. I was under the impression that these were foreign tapes, but maybe not. At any rate, the elements for a good show are all here. It's the presentation that nearly sinks this one.