I didn’t find Lethal Obsession to be unbearably horrible, nor did I find it to be good. In fact, the only thing I found it to be was bland and sluggish; a slow-moving detective story with tiny tastes of slasher fare.

On the outside, Lethal Obsession promises an intriguing twist on the slasher tradition: a dress-wearing serial killer murders girls while they’re stripping for their online voyeur site, thereby broadcasting the kills to the world.

The DVD cover is about as far as the intrigue goes though. A world-weary detective (Brad Mills) takes the online murderer case, his suspect list consisting of the voyeur site’s owner, Elizabeth Waters (Kitsie Duncan). As the detective investigates, we’re introduced to more girls of the Internet that we see for about thirty seconds before they’re murdered. Eventually, the detective gives up on the case and the movie ends.

The filmmakers try to keep the identity of the killer a secret. When a parallel story of two roommates is interspersed with the main story, it’s impossible and a bit offensive to try.
The overly-dramatic roommates are constantly quarreling because one watches too much online porn and the other constantly invades his bedroom. Since they don’t interact with the detective or the voyeur site at all, it’s obvious that one of them is the killer. The evident choice never being the right one, it’s even more obvious who the real killer is very early on, adding to the languor of the overall movie experience.

The acting in Lethal Obsession isn't terrible. Well, okay. It's pretty bad, but it didn't bother me half as much as the script the actors had to work with. It's unnatural to the point that I was unable to see the actors as real people in real situations. In a few scenes, the actors made the most of what they had, but those moments existed out of context of the rest of the film.

This film felt as though it really wanted to be a cheesy grindhouse film that asked for no apologies for its bloody filthy sex-stained ways, except that on every one of those counts, it fell short of a delivery that didn't require an immediate apology.

Scenes of the alluring Miss Waters bending over desks and flaunting her ample chest begin to feel like an old B movie, or even the intro to a low-budget porn flick, neither of which would be bad. As is, nothing goes far enough one way or another to be interesting. Pushed a tad further into the zany, this film could be a strong B movie entry. Pushed a lot farther into serious territory, Lethal Obsession could be a brutal slasher flick.

Like it's cousin-component sexuality, the killings tried to be more than they were, but ultimately amount to only time passed on-screen. The killer, who should be heartless and emotionless, manages only the portrayal of a confused and inept young man committing awkward atrocities. He's not intimidating, powerful, frightening... just a freak in a dress and mask pretending to be something from another film. Perhaps men in drag, even psychotic killers, aren't meant to be menacing.

Most of the blood and guts of the killings are done off-screen. A respectable choice; better to leave the real gore and pain to the imagination if you aren't confident you can pull off the practicality. It works well in this film with the one exception of the cheese-grater-to-the-vagina scene.

I don't have one, but I do bet that a cheese-grater repeatedly stabbed into a vagina would cause much more unbelievable pain than this girl is expressing. Her subtle whimpering and squirming tells me she has a leg cramp, not that her delicate pink is being violently torn apart. As the bloodiest scene in the film, it’s likely to be popular with the hard-gore crowd regardless.

Ironically, my favorite moment of the film is the enjoyably bad acting of Mr. Haas (Terry Dellinger), an early suspect in the murder investigation who can’t seem to talk his eyes off the camera. Haas enjoys his porn, so much so that he records himself enjoying it. Hoping to catch his big break into the business, he offers to lend his vast DVD library of self-made audition material to the detective. This is a nice piece of over-the-top acting in contrast to the lethargy of the rest of the film.

If this film weren't already shot, cut, printed, and packaged, I’d suggest losing the time-filler detective story and instead focusing on the voyeur girls and the murders. This would have allowed more time for character development, B-movie grade nudity, and terrifying kills.

All in all, I don't discredit this movie for its novice acting or its low-budget origins, poor camera angles or painful audio; I discredit it because the promise made on the DVD cover of something new and gorific was never delivered. There's nothing for the horror-gore fanatic to get too excited about nor is there really anything new added to the slasher genre that hasn’t been seen before despite claims otherwise. While the minute amount of story and gore might satisfy some, the extra time spent on the detective story certainly turned me off.