You won't be disappointed!

The greatest movie ever made..!

Fantastic!

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I observe that it's dubbed chiefly because most of these inexpensive imports -- and all the imports from the 1950s in their ENTIRETY -- seem to be dubbed by the same half-dozen people. They're vaguely British, very precisely articulated, and overemphatic. The men seem to be aiming for a particular image: a brute of a construction worker with a coffee-grinder voice, although if he is a gentleman he may sound more like a pouf. The women's voices show less differentiation. Mostly, they sound like some winsome lady behind the check-out counter at the local library, sweet with efficiency and all set to help you find that book on Mycenaean pottery.I don't know how much the story is worth bothering with. It's early in World War II, a young Italian aristocrat returns to his majestic villa with a gift from an Abyssinian chief, namely his daughter. According to the local customs, she is now his slave. The aristocrat is drained by his snooty wife and enters a refractory state on his first night home. Little does he know that in his absence, his wife has been getting it on with the pretty young secretary. Now you've got three women and one man. The women are either getting it on with one another or jealous. Make a mental note. You cannot have more than one woman dominant in a household. I refer you to the work of the anthropologist S. F. Nadel, who discovered that in a polygamous society, when the wives live in the same huts, witchcraft accusations soar. If the wives live in separate huts -- no witchcraft. Q. E. D.Anyway -- will someone help me down from this pulpit? My shoe seems to be stuck. Thank you. Anyway, all kinds of emotional tangles develop, not really worth explaining.What DOES need explaining is how an Italian aristocrat can return to his luxurious mansion with a native girl, shed his uniform, and decide to become a writer overnight. What do you do, just quit Il Duce's Army when you feel like it? In wartime? What the hell kind of an Army do you call that? How come I couldn't do it, not even in peacetime? No wonder Il Duce managed to lose every colony he had, including Italian Salamiland.But to get to the important part, there is an abundance of female nudity, frontal, dorsal, medial, proximal, distal, sagittal, coronal, transverse, external, and internal. In particular, you get to know Lilli Carati's nipples on a first-name basis. You can even discern the seventeen lactiferous ducts opening onto each one. There is a good deal of simulated sex in this ménage but most of it is cunnilingus or an approximation of it. It's a shame that the film aims so low because there's a lot of potential in the plot. I'm not think so much of "Lady Chatterly's Lover" as I'm thinking of Joseph Losey's "The Servant." It's masterfully done, while this one is mostly junk.

Alcove, The (1984) ** (out of 4) Interesting tale from D'Amato about a Captain (Al Cliver) returning from a battle in Africa where he was given a slave, Zerbal (Laura Gemser) as a gift for saving a tribal leader. Back at home his wife (Lilli Carati) is having an affair with her secretary (Annie Belle) but soon Zerbal begins to come between them but it might be more than just your typical lesbian affair. I was really surprised with this film because it's actually very well-made and features a pretty good story. One is probably going to walk into this thing expecting nothing but a sex romp and while there is a lot of sex it really never takes center stage over the story being told. D'Amato made a very long career out of sex movies so this one here is certainly a lot different than many of the items he was releasing around this period. What really stands out is the actual production. The film takes place during the 1940s so we've got the older cars, costumes and set design, all of which is extremely good looking. Another plus is the cinematography from D'Amato, which to me is his greatest aspect (a lot better than his directing). All of this makes for a pretty interesting atmosphere and most of the sex scenes are quite erotic (though some enter a camp level). The film also benefits from an fun Euro-cult cast with Gemser leading the way as the obvious sex object to everyone. If you've seen any of her films with D'Amato then you should know what to expect. Belle really stands out and delivers a fine performance as does Carati. Cliver, God bless him, is his usual fun self. What keeps the movie from being even better is its rather slow pacing and it also goes on a tad bit too long at 93-minutes. I think a good ten minutes could have been cut out and we really wouldn't have lost anything story-wise. The film is pretty straight-forward and is well-made but at the end of the day this here is still going to be for D'Amato completest only.

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.