Several of my fellow reviewers here, some of which I have known for years and usually always concur with, have referred to "The Alcove" as a beautiful and stylishly eroticist period-piece, AND as one of writer/director Joe D'Amato's best works. Alas, I can't say I agree this time. I found "The Alcove" dull and dumb, and with such an overload of lesbian sequences that it becomes monotonous quite fast.
Set in the mid-1930s, Al Cliver depicts a soldier/writer - and 'slash' swindler - who brings home a beautiful and submissive African Princess (= sex slave) and offers her to his wife Alexandra. The nymphomaniac Alexandra was already feasting her sexual lusts on her hubby's cute secretary Velma during his many trips away from home, and thus she certainly doesn't mind a fresh and sensual new bed partner! Velma is jealous and sees evil in Zerbal, but Alexandra gradually becomes obsessed with her. Velma is right, though, as Zerbal's sole mission is to get revenge for the abusive, racist, and disrespectful way she has been treated.
Okay, here's how I see it... Our pervy pal Joe D'Amato had the privilege of working with three of the most sensationally luscious women of the Italian exploitation industry: Laura Gemser, Lili Carati, and Annie Belle. He simply had to get maximum benefit out of that. Every smallest and most banal situation somehow turns into a lesbian orgy, and evidently there's always someone peeping up a skirt or through a keyhole. Towards the end, D'Amato even turns his cast into an amateur porno-movie gang, complete with nuns' outfits and savage rape by the drooling gardener. What's so stylish or erotic about that?
