Ossessione fatale

Yes, I managed to find this title in English. Flick is typical for D'Amato style--don't care and only end result counts. Indeed, he borrows heavily music, stills and ideas from his other movies and I sure recognize all his tricks but somehow its only add on positive side. Main female character is hot as hell and undress often, plot has twists and shouts and realism is visible in every note. I start thinking maybe something wrong with my taste--after all D'Amato considered B class rate but what is an A rate? These sugar-coated mainstream junk? I guess its not easy to break into mainstream and be yourself. History and time will figure this out.

Carmen Di Pietro plays Liza, a TV producer who is making a series about sex or something like this. One day, when she leaves the TV station where she works, she is approached by a robber who needs a large sum of money to pay off a poker debt. The robber forces Liza to take him to her house, but what he didn't expect was that the woman, after seducing him, would keep him handcuffed to her bed, treating him like a sex toy.

This premise had all the potential to offer an interesting sleazy sexploitation, in the same vein of the masterpiece "Emanuelle E Françoise (Le Sorelline)(1975), a film that also delt with a woman turning the table against a male predator. However, by 1991, the reality of Italian B cinema had changed drastically, and Joe D'Amato wasn't the same. His Filmirage was in its final days and the director soon would be almost exclusively shooting porn for alimentary reasons. Taking in consideration this context, it is easy to understand why a film like "Ossessione Fatale" doesn't bear the same quality as its equivalents of the 70's.

Aesthetically, the movie tries to emulate American cinema, but the result resembles a cheap TV production, although the level of skin exposition here is much higher than anything produced by American television. This "American" feeling was still a consequence of the success of Adrian Lyne's "91/2 Weeks" (1986), a pseudo-erotic product that must have had a huge impact in Joe D'Amato, given that from 1986 to 1992, he directed 14 softcore films in USA, mostly in the fascinating city of New Orleans, all of them lacking the nasty and sleazy aspects that marked the best works of the director, in favor of a more "clean" and mainstream flavor. Gone are the typical unusual camera movements, that rendered an irresistible charm even to the filler segments, in the early years. Instead, D'Amato's camera started to adopt a conventional approach, at best capturing the events in a correct way, with little to no trace of inventiveness.

One of the main flaws of the film, in my vision, is that it fails in creating tension. There is no sense of urgency, a factor that is aggravated by a soundtrack, credited to a certain Pahamian (the usual library music), that would fit better in a conventional romantic story.

The cast doesn't provide performances solid enough to make us to identify ourselves with any of them. As the protagonist, Carmen Di Pietro is very good to the eyes, with her typical Italian face and generous body curves that are well explored by the voyeuristic camera, but she didn't have the talent of a Luciana Ottaviani. Much worse is the case of the male protagonist, a certain Jonathan Bertuccelli. The poor guy spends most of the story naked and handcuffed to a bed, with one of the legs conveniently lifted to avoid the exposition of his genitals! And he never expresses a minimum of what is expected for someone in that embarrassing and dangerous situation. He just looks mortally bored and not knowing how to react.

"Ossessione Fatale" is no masterpiece, but it is still watchable, especially if you keep your expectations not very high. Fans of Carmen Di Pietro will be very satisfied with her frequent nude scenes and, for the completists of Aristide Massaccesi, the film stands out, at least, as one of his last efforts in genuine cinema, before falling definitely in the porn purgatory. Speaking of porn, the screenplay of this movie was written by Steve Morelli (aka Vincent Rooster), a disciple of Massaccesi who would follow a career as a porn director from the mid-90's onward.