Joe D'Amato laves his cannibal past and ventures into soft core porn. It is really more than an exhibition of full frontal - there is certainly enough of that. It actually has an interesting story about the fall of the landed gentry.The Colonel (Al Cliver - Zombie, The Beyond) returns from war with a chief's daughter (Laura Gemser - Black Emmanuel) in tow. His wife (Lilli Carati - Miss Italy 1975) is at first dismissive of the woman and certainly racist in her comments.Gemser is not happy with her position, and soon discovers that the wife and the Colonel's secretary (Annie Belle - The House on the Edge of the Park) have their own thing going. She plot to get the wife on her side using her considerable skills at lovemaking.Meanwhile, the Colonel is discovering he is a failure as a writer and the banks are clamoring at the door. He decides to make porn films. Things do not go well for Belle, as she is paired with the gardener (Roberto Caruso). But, she gets her revenge in the end.The cinematography was excellent.

Following a successful campaign in Africa, soldier Elio De Silveris (Al Cliver) returns home to his wife Alessandra (Lilli Carati) bearing all manner of exotic souvenirs, the most unusual being Zerbal (Laura Gemser), an Abyssinian princess presented to him as a slave in return for saving the king's life.At first Allesandra is hostile to Zerbal, as is Elio's sexy secretary Wilma (Annie Bell), with whom Allesandra has been having a lesbian affair in her husband's absence; but when ownership of Zerbal is transferred to Allessandra (in a strange ritual that entails plenty of licking), the lusty wife's attitude does a 180 degree turn and she takes the dusky maiden for her lover, putting Wilma's nose severely out of joint. Soon, scheming Zerbal becomes the domineering force in the household.This mid-career effort from prolific Italian sleaze merchant Joe D'amato sees the seasoned exploitation director tentatively entering Tinto Brass territory, delivering plenty of 1930s period charm, an atmosphere of constant sexual tension, loads of lush cinematography, and, of course, oodles of soft-focus, soft-core coupling with the emphasis on lesbianism. No stranger to capturing smut on camera, D'amato masterfully handles the steamy action, concentrating his attention on the sensuality of the lovemaking, although one can sense that the director is yearning to go further, his camera permanently on the prowl for even the slightest glimpse of snatch.Eventually, Joe just can't help himself and sneaks in some genuine hardcore filth and old school exploitation during the film's final act: the graphic sex arrives in the form of a (genuine?) vintage stag flick screened by Elio, who intends to raise some much needed cash by making similar films, with his three women as his stars. Amazingly, the ladies agree to the project, but when the camera begins to roll, in true D'amato style, events turn decidedly nasty: Wilma is bound and abused by Allesandra and Zerbal, and raped by Elio's eager gardener Pepe (who has been planning to tend to her bush ever since spying it in the garden). After the ordeal is over, an understandably upset Wilma vows to make them pay for what they have done to her.From an exploitation fan's point of view, this lurid rape/revenge scenario is a great way to end matters, and narrowly saves The Alcove from being just another vapid mid-eighties piece of Euro-erotica. Not essential D'amato, but not entirely worthless either, I rate The Alcove a reasonable 5.5 out of 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.

For some reason in the early to mid 80's Italian director Joe D'Amato stopped making his swinging 70's "Black Emanuelle" films and/or his gut-munching cannibal/zombie films and started trying to make the kind of classy softcore erotica more commonly associated with his fellow countryman, Tinto Brass. None of these films was entirely successful, but this one might have been the least unsuccessful. A military veteran (Al Cliver) returns from a WWII military campaign to his rural villa in Italy bringing with him an Abyssinian slave (Laura Gemser), who had been sold to him by her father. Although she starts out as timid and demure Arab woman in a burka it isn't long before she is (quite unbelievably) sun-bathing in the nude and seducing the bisexual lady of the house, the military man's second wife (Lili Karati). Soon she is running the entire household and it is up to a female servant/spurned lesbian lover of the wife (Annie Belle) and the military man's grown son to try to stop her.The cast is a little weak since they are all softcore porn stars. Al Cliver was never much of an actor and since he is all of about thirty here, is none too convincing as a middle-aged veteran with an adult son. Laura Gemser was also not a great actress, but she was somewhat underrated and gives one of her more game performances here. Unfortunately, an Indonesian actress really has her work cut playing a North African character, and one goes who through some absolutely unbelievable changes in such a short movie. The real surprises here though are Lili Karati and Annie Bell. Karati started out as a Miss Italy runner-up and ended up in hardcore porn, but she was a modestly talented actress who gave a few decent performances (perhaps the most famous perhaps in Fernando DiLeo's "Being Twenty"). She acquits herself pretty well here. Annie Belle was simply not an actress. In her 70's roles like "End of Innocence" and "Laure" she allegedly played herself--a hardly legal Lolita with a bleach-blonde pixie cut who couldn't keep her clothes on for five minutes and would jump on anything with genitalia. (She was Al Cliver's real-life lover and the not-particularly-reliable David Hess claims to have had real sex with her during their scene in "House by the Edge of the Park"). Anyway, in this movie her pixie haircut and adolescent body are gone and she seems to be genuinely ACTING for once.D'Amato gets as-good-as-can-be-expected performances from his porn star cast and as always his cinematography is above par (cinematography was D'Amatos first specialty and one he perhaps should have stuck with). He was also well known for his generally fast-moving sex scenes and his incredible lack of political correctness and good taste. Unfortunately, the sex scenes here are very LONG and the kind of standard, mostly tame lesbian stuff that manages to make even the impressive bodies of Gemser, Karati, and Belle seem pretty boring after awhile. There is SOME tasteless politically incorrect violence thrown into the mix, but not until the very end unfortunately (when the typical audience member would have long since shot his wad and fallen asleep). Of course,some do consider this one of D'Amato's better films. If you like his Tinto Brass-type stuff you might like this, but for me it could have really used some gut-munching cannibals or something.

D'Amato comes over all Tinto Brass in this tale of fascism and twisted passion set in 1930s Italy. A faded aristocrat military officer returns from the Abyssinian war with a dusky slave girl as a prize; at first, his bisexual wife and his secretary (who is also the wife's lover) dislike the girl intensely, making racist comments about her skin colour and "smell." But soon the girl charms her way into the mistress' affection, supplanting both secretary and husband. This causes jealousies to fester.The aristocrat has other problems. He tries to make a career as a writer but this doesn't bring in enough cash to pay off his debts, so he buys a movie camera and decides to make stag films as a means of income. Of course, wife, secretary and slave are supposed to star in the film. The two strands of the story come together in a film within the film, as the secretary is sexually humiliated on camera by the two other women and a grimy old gardener. At this point in the film, the slave girl seems to be gaining ascendance, but the secretary brings in her ally, the master's cadet son, and they put the Other to death in flames, holding hands as she burns in a perfect picture of that alliance between the middle classes and militarism which was political fascism.The film has many intriguing features. The slave's rise from household toy to manipulative mistress is a Steerpike-like climb which ultimately does her no good – suggesting that colonised people who play the white man's game will ultimately be undone in their European ambitions as the priggish right-wing white middle classes wreak their revenge. The aristocratic man's trajectory is also compelling, from "great white god" (as the secretary describes him) through failed literary gent to pornographer – almost the trajectory of European society since the war (which makes the film possibly a prophecy of the future as much as a vision of the past).The film is measured and plays out like a classy piece of eroticism, but the drama continually brews away with shifting alignments and eruptions of desire always around every corner to keep the narrative moving. The film offers no succour to either liberationists nor liberals, as it predicts the failure of individual identity politics alongside a portrait of permissiveness as terminal decadence. D'Amato's own gradual slide into pornography was in process as the film was made and with his muse Laura Gemser as the Abyssinian slave, one could also take the film as a kind of mordant and resigned comment on his own career, a cultured and privileged European male dragged down into a mess of pornographic pottage by his own financial needs and his putting before his own society a beautiful black Emanuelle.