SEE NO EVIL (1971)
aka Blind Terror
Article 2414 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-5-2007
Posting Date: 3-22-2008
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Featuring Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey

A blind woman is staying with relatives in a home in the English countryside. She returns there one day, unaware that the whole family has been murdered. Unfortunately, the murderer left a piece of evidence in the home, and he returns to get it…

Through no fault of its own, this movie started out on the wrong step with me; I mistakenly believed that Mia Farrow had played the lead in WAIT UNTIL DARK (it was Audrey Hepburn), and I found myself believing that Mia Farrow was just recycling a past success. This is patently unfair; not only was my assumption wrong, but this movie is really trying to be something else than a recycling of WAIT UNTIL DARK. Still, it started me on the wrong foot, and I was prepared to dislike this movie from the get-go. The opening moments of the movie annoyed me with what seemed to me fairly heavy-handed scenes about violence and sex in modern society (the exploitative double feature at the theater, the toy gun in the store window, etc.). As the movie progressed, I kept finding other things to annoy me; the general slickness of the production, at least one impossible-to-swallow plot element (just how long was that guy wandering around with a bullet in him?), the strident unpleasantness of Mia Farrow’s performance when she’s being terrorized (her voice takes on a shrill, grating quality in these scenes), and the movie’s almost non-stop attempts to make her situation go from bad to worse. Nevertheless, I now find myself wondering whether I might not have liked this one more if I hadn’t gone into it with the assumption I did. Somehow, I suspect I’ll never know, but as it sits now, this one left a bad taste in my mouth.