Softcore Reviews

The Alcove pairs the frequent nudity of Joe D’Amato’s softcore work with some of the cruelty of his horror movies, and glosses it over with the high society sheen of a Tinto Brass epic. It ain’t your ordinary D’Amato film, and it finds him branching out into new directions…

Hoo boy. I’ve always worried that my position here at Softcore Reviews would lead me down a depraved path towards midget porn. This happened much sooner than I could’ve imagined, thanks to the release on DVD of The Sinful Dwarf, courtesy of our sleazy friends at Severin Films. Technically it isn’t actually midget porn (it’s softcore), but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to take a shower afterwards…

This movie starts off very promisingly with the lovely Melissa prancing around mostly naked on a Dominican beach. The sex scene that follows is awfully hot and involves this dusky maiden and a fellow whose penis appears well on its way to excitement. She takes a slice of the title fruit and rubs it up and down his body, then licks it off of him. This is going good! In fact, you can actually see her brushing up against his member. And then—oh crud. I think she just bit off his penis…

This is the only classic “Black Emanuelle” movie in Black Emanuelle’s Box: Volume 2, in the sense that it teams up Laura Gemser and director Joe D’Amato, and of course Gemser’s husband Gabriele Tinti is along for the ride as well. It follows the general path of best of them – an international travelogue, interspersed with sex scenes…

This is a weird one. There’s a lot of “Black Emanuelle” films out there with doubtful provenance, but without Laura Gemser in the title role, does this one technically belong with the others? It’s got a few things going for it. For one, it is an official sequel. The director is Bitto Albertini, who directed the original Black Emanuelle with Laura Gemser and Karen Schubert, the one that set the whole enterprise in motion…