THE ALCOVE: In The Garden Of Neapolitan Sleaze With Joe D’Amato

Italy has pro­duced a bevy of film­mak­ers noto­ri­ous for their will­ing­ness to “go there” in the name of sleaze but few are as syn­ony­mous with the form as Aristide Massacessi, best known to his fans as “Joe D’Amato.”  This cinematographer-turned-director cranked out a vari­ety of sex and hor­ror prod­uct in his day that has become noto­ri­ous amongst fans of Eurosleaze for his unflinch­ing approach.  He worked steadily from the early 1970’s through the end of the 1990’s, crank­ing out every­thing from sword & sor­cery flicks to hard­core porno (the spe­cialty of his later years).

Regardless of the genre he was tack­ling, D’Amato could be counted on to throw him­self into the material’s extremes.  The Alcove is among the more restrained exam­ples of his oeu­vre, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared with the likes of Emanuelle In America and Beyond The Darkness, but it still offers an earthy, intense approach to sex­u­al­ity that lives up to his cult rep­u­ta­tion… not to men­tion a few unex­pected shocks that give it a nice sting in the tail.

The Alcove is set in the 1930’s and begins with Elio (Al Cliver) return­ing home from Italy’s war with Abyssinia.  He is greeted by Alessandra (Lilli Carati), his reli­giously unfaith­ful bisexual-nymphomaniac wife, and Wilma (Annie Belle), her ambi­tious assis­tant and secret lover.  Elio adds fur­ther spice to this hotbed with a “gift” he brought home from the war: Zerbal (Laura Gemser), a princess who was given to him as a slave.

Elio is hired to write a mem­oir and sets to work, co-opting Velma to work as his assis­tant.  Zerbal is treated with scorn by the women at first but soon becomes accus­tomed to her new home’s mix­ture of lust and deceit and manip­u­lates the insa­tiable Alessandra into an affair.  Meanwhile, Velma becomes involved with Furio (Roberto Caruso), Elio’s son.  Elio becomes des­per­ate when his finances start to slip and pur­chases film­mak­ing equip­ment from a war widow, plan­ning to shore up his for­tunes by mak­ing pornos with his house­ful of women — and that’s where things really get crazy in that unique Joe D’Amato way…

The Alcove is likely to amuse those who rem­i­nisce about the days of late-night Skinemax view­ing because it isn’t shy about being smutty.  There is plenty of bare flesh, much of it pro­vided by a very game Carati, lots of heavy-breathing soft­core shenani­gans and an atmos­phere of lusty deca­dence.  The Italo-softcore tri­umvi­rate of Carati, Belle and Emanuelle icon Gemser is a potent one as they dish-up a one-two punch of clothing-free frol­ics and over­heated emot­ing.  D’Amato cap­i­tal­izes on this trio’s assets with his unerr­ing knack for find­ing the per­fect crotch-level angle from which to shoot every cou­pling (D’Amato dou­bled as cin­e­matog­ra­pher here,  as he often did on his films).

That said, The Alcove is sur­pris­ingly ambi­tious for a skin-flick.  Ugo Moretti’s script is unusu­ally char­ac­ter and plot-oriented and D’Amato also shows sur­pris­ing restraint, keep­ing his id in check, at least until the last 15 min­utes, and con­cen­trat­ing on the sto­ry­line.  There are some flaws: the per­for­mances of the male actors are a bit wooden (Cliver is sup­posed to be a drunk but never remem­bers to act boozy).  More impor­tantly, the end­ing is too abrupt to be truly sat­is­fy­ing.  Sure, it ends things on a note of slap-in-the-face sur­prise but it also leaves a num­ber of frus­trat­ing loose ends dangling.

Thankfully, the last reel packs a punch over­all and this asset, along with the cen­tral trio of star­lets, makes the film a worth a look for the Eurosleaze faith­ful.  It’s also worth not­ing that Gemser has one of her best roles here and she clearly is hav­ing fun as she makes the tran­si­tion from vic­tim to tor­men­tor.  It’s more than a lit­tle ridicu­lous for her to have been cast as an African princess but she’s sexy enough that few are likely to care.

In sum­ma­tion, The Alcove is nei­ther as sleazy or shock­ing as D’Amato flicks can be but it cre­ates a hyp­notic spell of its own for those into this sort of thing.  Severin’s recent DVD offers a nice view­ing option for the curi­ous, boast­ing a solid trans­fer, a trailer and a fun inter­view fea­turette where the now-deceased D’Amato talks about his career circa the mid-1990’s.