Obssession: A Taste for Fear (1981)
Another film (along with Whirlpool (1970)) that I watched over the weekend without any prior knowledge of the movie. While I usually like to know something about whatever I'm going to watch, in order to try and avoid watching absolute clunkers, the blind approach can sometimes pay off. As it did with Whirlpool, which turned out to be an interesting, if rather bleak, early Jose Larraz movie. Obssession: A Taste for Fear (1981), however, left me with somewhat more mixed feelings. From the streaming channel's very brief description, I was expecting a giallo of some kind, which it is, sort of, but it mashes this together with several other genres. The basic plot concerns a mysterious figure who is murdering models involved in a series of S&M photo-shoots, which sounds like a giallo, except that the setting is a futuristic Rome, where porn seems to be mainstream, people drive cars that come straight out of science fiction comics and policemen carry pistols that shoot laser beams. The plot is pretty thin and lacks any of the twists, suspense and bizarre over-the-top murders (not to mention sex) you'd normally expect from a giallo. The cast, likewise, is fairly bland, seemingly cast, in the main, for their looks rather than their acting ability (with a couple of notable exceptions). Ultimately, the film is a triumph of style over substance, with Piccio Raffinini's direction making it all look like a TV commercial or a pop video.
Rome, in Raffinini's vision, is permanently bathed in bright neon colours, often red or pink, with plenty of dry ice providing swirlimg ground-hugging mists outside to provide a noirish feel to these scenes. The interiors are all brightly lit, open plan and decorated in shades of white. It's a striking look, creating a memorable vision of an urban tomorrow, which predates Blade Runner's similar vision of a noirish neon-lit future by a year. Unfortunately, the film fails to find any balance between content and presentation, with the plot and characters feeling perfunctory and under-developed, simply a prop on which the stylish visuals are hung. The murders themselves aren't particularly imaginatively staged and the attempts to cast suspicion on various cast members unconvincing - for anyone who has seen a few giallos, the real identity of the murderer will be obvious from early on. As already noted, the cast is fairly bland, but does include Virginia Hey (familiar from Farscape and various Australian soaps earlier in her career), Goia Scola (The Atlantis Interceptors) and Gerard Darmon (Betty Blue, The Good Thief and many others). While it wasn't quite what I was expecting, Obssession: A Taste for Fear was, nonetheless, a fascinating film to watch, with its combination of giallo, science fiction and sex film, even if its central story was ultimately disappointing.
Labels: Movies in Brief
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home