Search - Dante's Cove: The Complete First Season on DVD

Badly acted etc. but also quite unique and strangely compell

M. J Leonard | Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States | 10/07/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"In 1840 the small seaside town of Dante's Cove was awash in strange goings on. Grace Neville (Traci Scoggins) is about to be married to a young Ambrosius (William Gregory Lee). Although she's getting on in years, Grace is now sure she's finally met the man that she wants to settle down with. Is Ambrosius, however, really all that he appears or does he just want Grace for her money?



One afternoon, after visiting him, Grace realizes that she's forgotten her gloves, so she returns to his house only to find her suitor caught up in a hot and passionate session with his hunky and studly young butler. Shocked, she screams at them both, calling them deviant and disgusting vowing to make them both pay for their betrayal.



For Grace, it's immediately hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Furious and determined to seek revenge, she uses her supernatural and mystical powers to instantly burn her fiancé's boy toy with her very eyes - you actually see him frothing at the mouth - and then entombs her beau in an SM/dungeon beneath the Hotel Dante, placing an eternal curse on him.



Ambrosius is destined to spend perpetuity, shackled to chains. The only way the curse can be broken is if some virile male kisses him and breaks the spell. Meanwhile, in the present day, the young Toby (Charlie David) is living at Dante Cove when he invites his gorgeous lover Kevin (Gregory Michael) to spend some time with him.



Kevin and Toby are having problems. Although it looks as though they're having great sex, it seems Kevin's a bit of a closet case and is having trouble coming out to his homophobic parents, who have cottoned on the fact that Kevin is having an affair with Toby. After some domestic abuse, Kevin escapes to Dante's Cove, a little Key West-style hamlet featuring an inn of the same name where Toby bartends.



Within minutes of arriving, Kevin meets the eclectic cast of sexy characters, there's Van, a gothic lesbian, Amber a lesbian party girl, and totally gay muscle stud Adam, the resident boy toy. But it is the ghost of Ambrosius that Kevin begins to hear as Toby's hunky presence begins to release a menacing force from the hotel's past. Grace, ageless and still very beautiful, has survived, and is obsessed with getting together with her former paramour.



As the evil begins to spread in the form of a rejuvenated grace, Kevin and Adam and the rest of the sexy inhabitants of Dante's Cove find themselves literally fighting for their lives. The story in Dante's Cove is really just an excuse to tie together various scenes of what I call soft-core gay and lesbian "boutique" sex. Kevin and Toby spend most of their time engaged man-on-man action, which is mostly, made up of hazy images of flesh seen through the haze of steam and tastefully situated candles.



Dante's Cove gravitates between the jaw-dropping awful and ludicrous guilty fun. There have been a lot of B-grade actresses over the past few years that seem to be making a career out of appearing in low budget gay material - Jill St. John, Jacqueline Bisset, and Morgan Fairchild, but now Traci Scoggins can add herself to the list. Although she's by far the best actor in this series, her performance still vacillates between mostly watch-able to appallingly trite and melodramatic.



Most of the male cast don't fair much better, babbling their lines until the next nude scenes which aren't really that sexy or even that titillating. Although done on the cheap, the series looks mostly well made - perhaps with a bit more money they could get a better scriptwriter and employ better visual effects. The cast is very attractive of course both in the nude and fully clothed. In the end, this is trashy television at it's best, truly awful but also quite compelling, Mike Leonard October 06.

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