OLIVER's Mark Lester dreams of "flying carpets and dying kings" in the living nightmare that is SUDDEN TERROR, on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

Ziggy (Lester) and his big sister Pippa (Susan George, THE HOUSE WHERE EVIL DWELLS) are spending the summer with their grandfather (Lionel Jeffries, THE AMAZING MR. BLUNDEN), a former colonel who lives in a lighthouse on an island under British occupation. The setting is ripe for "pathological liar" Ziggy to let his imagination run wild, and his stories are generally tolerated and his inventiveness even admired by his grandfather. The island's people are highly anticipating a visit by the president, and Pippa takes Ziggy to see the motorcade. When Pippa is distracted by flirtatious tourist Tom Jones (Tony Bonner, MONEY MOVERS), Ziggy wanders around and follows a policeman (Peter Vaughn, SYMPTOMS) into the apartments above a café where he sees the man assassinate the president passing on the street below. The policeman sees him and Ziggy flees. Meanwhile, Tom is trying to calm a panicked Pippa as the crowd erupts into chaos and Ziggy is nowhere to be found. When Ziggy does meet up with his sister and Tom after evading the killer and his partner (Peter Bowles, BLOW UP), she refuses to listen to him, particularly when he tells her that the killer was a policeman and sends him up to his room. With news of a curfew imposed during the investigation, Pippa's grandfather invites Tom to stay with them for the night. Although grandfather acknowledges Ziggy's propensity to make up stories for the sake of it, he believes it is out of character for Ziggy to lie just to get out of trouble. When police visit for a house-to-house search, a frightened Ziggy flees back to the town and implores his friend Ann-Marie (Maxine Kalli) to get his story to the police since he does not know who to trust. Meanwhile, the chief police inspector (Jeremy Kemp, THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION), who was in the passenger seat of the president's car during the killing, starts to put together disparate clues and wonder if they really are dealing with a political murder after all.

The feature debut of director John Hough (THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE), who had cut his teeth on action material with episodes of THE AVENGERS, SUDDEN TERROR is a nail-biting suspense in which Lester is the right combination of innocent and mischievous without being cloying. Hough's compositions and editing are so economical and efficient that the subsequent killing seem particularly ruthless and gratuitous, which has the effect of making the viewer question just what kind of hitmen these characters are supposed to be. The Maltese settings are always atmospherically captured and deployed, with a sense of playfulness despite the gravity of the situation as the boy's boundless curiosity has also unwittingly prepared him with the knowledge of the terrain and the know-how to evade his pursuers in a head-on chase while it is the well-intentioned actions of others that puts him and others in danger. George has little to do but scream, and Bonner and Kemp are underused, but Jeffries makes for an engaging presence. The folksy title song "Eyewitness" by Fairfield Parlour and the title sequence graphics both provide viewer with an idea of Ziggy's inner world while also suggesting a lighter tone that is undermined by flashes of portents of death and dashed with the brutality of the assassination. The film was produced by American producer Paul Maslansky who had previously produced Warren Kiefer's CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD and Michael Reeves' THE SHE BEAST, both lensed in Italy, and a trio of films in the U.K. including RAW MEET/DEATHLINE before a period at Fox stateside that included RACE WITH THE DEVIL and then onto Warner Bros. with the hit POLICE ACADEMY series.

Released theatrically by National General Pictures as SUDDEN TERROR and on VHS in the early eighties by Fox's Magnetic Video, EYEWITNESS was not available again until Anchor Bay's Studio Canal deal at the dawn of the format with an anamorphic DVD featuring a commentary by Hough and uncredited co-writer/executive producer Bryan Forbes (SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON) moderated by journalist Jonathan Sothcott and trailers under both titles. Kino Lorber's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from a new 4K master using the British title with the American title added as a subtitle. The image looks quite lush for its sunburnt setting, with a great sense of depth owing to Hough's use of wide angle lenses and foreground objects, and the naturalistic colors of the locations are spiked with saturated colors in the wardrobe, bloodshed, and the Maltese flag. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is clear enough that some post-dubbing of supporting actors is more evident, and optional English SDH subtitles are included.

The disc ports from the Anchor Bay edition the audio commentary by Hough and Forbes. The latter recalls that he had been offered the job of running Elstree Studios. While that would kill his directing career, he had had so many criticisms about the impositions upon filmmakers by studios that he had better put up or shut up. He recalls that the film was brought to him by producer Irving Allen (THE GAMMA PEOPLE) and that he did a rewrite without reading the Mark Hebden source novel (Hough was unaware that there was a source novel until the commentary session), and that he handled much of the casting with Maslansky and Allen while Hough only suggested Jeffries. They recall the difficulty of filming due to the unstable political situation in Malta at the time, and they had difficulties with local censorship. The disc also includes a new track with film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson who start off the bat revealing that Fairfield Parlour was actually the band Kaleidoscope, and that the theme song which had only been released as a promotional Japanese 45 at the time of release is present as a bonus track on the CD and digital release of their album. They also reveal that the Gary Sherman who designed the titles is indeed the American Gary Sherman who helmed DEATHLINE, having worked at a U.K. graphics company that mainly did commercials (see the Scream Factory Blu-ray of VICE SQUAD for Sherman's extensive discussion of his period in the U.K.) and that "musical coordinator" Jonathan Demme was indeed the director of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS who was at the time a reporter covering the British rock scene. They also discuss Hough's directorial style and visual choices, noting also the recurring visuals in the film of humanoid shapes from mannequins pieces to the shadows that frighten Ziggy while fleeing his pursuers, and how they contribute to the illusion of the substitution of a dummy for a character tossed off a cliff into the ocean.