The Global Cafe - The Alcove

by John Arminio

My favorite thing about Severin DVD releases is that the company lauds a particular film’s director as “notorious” or “infamous” for his salacious content. What this usually means is that the director is an incompetent purveyor of smut who chooses to dilute his pornography with equal parts mind-numbingly boring plot and fake gore. In the case of Joe D’Amato’s The Alcove, the gore is replace simply by more plot, such as it is, which means the viewer is treated to scenes of blank-face actors reciting lines with the enthusiasm of bored junkies reading from a phone book; bored junkies pretending to be aristocrats in Mussolini-era Italy.

What strikes the viewer immediately upon commencing The Alcove is its absurd amount of racism. After some half-hearted attempts at titillation between Alessandra and Wilma, two of the female leads, Elio De Silveris returns to his palatial country estate as the conquering White Warrior. With him, as a gift for Alessandra, his philandering/bisexual wife, is Zerbal, the daughter of a tribal chief who owed some sort of Wookie life debt to De Silveris. Zerbal is immediately subjected to all sorts of racial epithet concerning her savage state and her filthy nature, including the suggestion that she be presented “to the zoo” (cue derisive laughter from all characters). Um, hilarious? The fact that she is property and that she should be treated as a “pet” is frequently discussed with her in the vicinity, all while her Italian masters wonder what is to be done with her (hint: sexual depravity is in the future).

Now, one might argue that the racism on display by the white characters is supposed to be abhorrent, that the audience is supposed to hate their behavior, and that this was an attempt to establish sympathy for the foreign slave girl. This would mean that we are supposing Joe D’Amato, Italian sleaze merchant, intended this film to be a cogent social commentary on the colonial policies and racial hegemony present in the expansionist practices of fascist Italy. I find this unlikely. Not to mention the fact that the “Abyssinian” Zerbal is played by the Indonesian actress Laura Gemser, making her geographically farther removed from the Ethiopia she supposedly calls home than the Europeans who are her captors.

The sensorial assault of offensive content does not stop at the dialogue, however. The score seems to the same thirty seconds of faux-saxophone elevator music repeated ad nauseam. As a bonus, some stereotypical Indian snake charmer flute music is played whenever Zerbal is central to the scene, which is odd since the character’s supposed to be from Africa.

On a personal note, I really don’t see the point in films of this nature. Am I supposed to be sexually aroused by two unenthusiastic actress portraying Mussolini-era aristocrats dry-humping each other? Oh yeah, bored fascists. Hot stuff. The “story´ is told through dreadful dialogue spoken by seemingly the same English voiceover actors that dub every European sleaze picture (or at least it sounds that way). As a final insult to the sensibilities of oxygen-breathing humans everywhere, the main characters, out of the blue, decide to make a pornographic film of their own, which turns out just to be them filming themselves gang-rape another character. It’s pretty gross.

Despite the admittedly interesting (or at least unique) setting and the hilarious suggestion that members of the Italian military could refer to themselves as “conquerors” at any time in history after the Roman Empire, there is really no reason to watch The Alcove. It’s equally inept at being titillating as it is at telling a decent story, and its story is probably surpassed in quality by Twilight fan fiction. As such, the prospect that the filmmakers found the content of this film sexually arousing in any way is far more disturbing that anything in the film itself. I mean, really. Ew.

The Global Cafe