Guilty Pleasure – See No Evil, Hear No Evil

  • Title: See No Evil, Hear No Evil
  • IMDb: link

The third film to star Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor was generally panned when it hit theaters in 1989. However, for a kid who saw this in theaters, the comedy featuring Wilder as deaf and Pryor as blind, thrown together as an odd couple both mistaken for killers and hunted by both the police (Alan North and Louis Giambalvo) and real killers (Joan Severance and Kevin Spacey) for an invaluable coin they don’t even know they posses falls squarely into the guilty pleasure category.

The script for See No Evil, Hear No Evil is, admittedly, idiotic. However, Wilder and Pryor are still enjoyable together on screen in a number of gags such as their ridiculous attempts to try and blend in (only leading them to  stand out more), a number of simple misunderstandings causing the various cops in the film no end of frustration, and Wilder holding Severance hostage with nothing but his, ah, cocked rocket. Well, who can blame him?

Unable to convince the police of their innocence, the pair decide to take on the killers and their employer (Anthony Zerbe) themselves, prove their innocence, and rescue Wally’s sister Adele (Kirsten Childs) who gets pulled into their shenanigans. The climax and epilogue of the film don’t really make much sense, as the police choose simply to believe them and arrest the remaining baddies, but there’s certainly, some admittedly dumb, fun in getting there.

The film has been released on VHS, DVD, and once on Blu-ray (but not in the last decade) and is a little hard to track down, although it is currently available to rent or buy on multiple streaming platforms.


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Silver Streak

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