The Naked Goddess

The good news about "The Naked Goddess", a forgotten porn project from 2 decades back, is that it was shot in 35mm and as an American vehicle for Italian star Moana Pozzi they hired the best in the business to direct, Gerard Damiano. Bad news is that it is perfunctory filmmaking, extremely unsatisfying given the practice at the time (especially in Europe, where the target audience for this one would be) of splitting films in two parts, making this Part One a completely unresolved cliffhanger.

Unlike cliffhangers in the Action film genre, this non-ending inspires no thrills, chills or anxiety, or impulse to want to see how it ends either. That's because Damiano's lame plot line concerns star Jonathan Morgan's sexual dysfunction, not the familiar erectile failure but rather an inability to cum. His fellow lawyer bud Buck Adams drags him for a weekend to The Château, where star Pozzi as title hooker supposedly will cure him.

How to stretch that flimsy premise to fill two feature films is merely to emphasize the sex, and Damiano has rounded up a starry cast to basically go gonzo lite in extremely dull fashion. Given two sex scenes, first a one-on-one with Moana, and later a d.p. alongside Tom Chapman on the blonde beauty from Italy, Peter North elects to sort of go anonymous, though fans of his cum shots can spot him a mile away. Perhaps he ws cast to emphasize what Morgan's character cannot achieve.

There's plenty of anal sex, and so much oral action that this film has to be classified as cock-centric, despite the arresting beauty of its heroine. She gamely practices her English, especially during a lengthy monologue in which she talks about her life, and even lapses into Italian at one point. But other than a girl who feels compelled to service men, she has no characterization and not surprisingly never made it in the U.S., before her untimely death in 1994.

Part One ends with Morgan left hanging. Pozzi has given him a blow job and his dick was erect, but no ejaculation. He has a dumb nightmare about it and fans get the old "To be continued..." card as their reward. I have reviewed Part Two separately, not much better.