One of the two-hundred-and-forty-six cinema related hobbies I have includes tracking down as many Gialli as humanly possible! The true Italian Giallo flourished from the mid-sixties until the early seventies, and uniquely combined extreme violence with gratuitous sleaze and flamboyant whodunit-plots. Throughout the late eighties, there were a couple of noteworthy attempts to revive the genre, but not too many titles from this era are worth seeking out. "Midnight Ripper", "Spider Labyrinth", "Formula for a Murder", and "Nothing Underneath" are fine 80s Gialli; "Obsession: A Taste for Fear" is not.
"Obsession: A Taste for Fear" is a very curious hybrid of a Giallo and a few other genres, and although the set-up is definitely original, it doesn't work at all. For starters, it's a Sci-Fi story for no apparent reason and without any added value. The lead heroine drives in a silly electric vehicle and chooses her outfit and make-up via a digital application, but furthermore the script doesn't do anything with the Sci-Fi elements. The story revolves around a headstrong and confident feminist photographer whose models (and lesbian lovers) are getting killed. She then also starts a passionate relationship with the investigating homicide detective. Sure, this may sound like an intriguing plot, but the film is painfully boring and unnecessarily complex.
It takes an incredibly long time before the first murder occurs, and the onscreen violence/bloodshed is disappointingly tame. Most of the running time exists of endless photo shoots full of nudity (not the exciting kind, though) and boring monologues of lead actress Virginia Hey. If I browse around the user-comments, "Obsession: A Taste of Fear" clearly has several devoted fans, but I - for one - can't find a lot to recommend.
