Goddess of Love

Since the essential plot elements are mentioned by the other reviewers, all I want to point out is that Goddess of Love is a good-looking little film, with an aura of authenticity. The plot seems to be secondary, making the film an acting showcase for its star, Alexis Kendra, playing the role of a young and mentally unstable stripper named Venus. And what a showcase it is! Helping along is Woody Naismith, in the role of Brian, a photographer and a love interest, playing the character with wonderfully nuanced performance. Once in a while, a film like this one pops out, head and shoulders above films with similar budgets. Beautifully shot and directed by Jon Knautz. Pleasure to watch!

So, a stripper meets a guy at her job after following the advice from another stripper about picking out men to fleece. The things is, she is a novice and she falls for the guy instead of following her fellow stripper's advice. And we travel into the descent of madness for some strange reason because it doesn't make any logical sense to do so because films seems to speed up a relationship when all logic fails. Why do they do this all the time, a guy meets a girl a girl meets a guy and 3 minutes later they fall in love. Not real and this isn't real. I read another reviewers comments and it seems as if that person may have had a connection with the film because what they wrote had nothing to do with the film and what I experienced. In fact, based on those comments, I watched the film and as I watched it, I was very close to abandoning it because it was treading down well worn paths. I was hoping for better but in the end, it was no surprise with the ending as the attempt to misdirect throughout the film was an absolute failure as was the premise.

"Goddess of Love" was far better than I was expecting, especially since it was on ScreamBox. And I wish I could rate it higher, but there is slow burn...and way too slow burn. This is the latter.

Alexis Kendra plays stripper Venus, who quickly falls for a recently widowed Australian she meets at the club. It doesn't take long before he's ready to move on and start seeing someone else and she spirals into a manic state. When the new girlfriend brings her stuff that she left at the ex's place, they get into a confrontation. It gets worse when Venus looks through her stuff and finds a busted statue of Venus with a card saying "love" attached. Now she REALLY goes over the bend and after finding the new girlfriend's house, leaves a gift of her own which is really disturbing if you're an animal lover. From that point on it's pretty violent, and the ending is somewhat, "huh?"

Overall, the acting is pretty good, and Kendra is particularly fascinating to watch. Her eyes are beautiful and I could see how she could seduce men easily. She handled the dramatic scenes well and real cried instead of fake cried, so extra points there. The cinematography was quite good, sometimes so stunning it overwhelmed the scenes. The pacing, however, was problematic, and the first two acts are kind of boring while you're waiting for something to happen other than Venus pining over a man who isn't serious about her. You just want to have a heart to heart and say, "Kiddo, you're a stripper. You are never going to be marriage material to him." Of course, she might stab you to death for saying that, as she IS crazy. But was she crazy before Mr. Australia rocked her world? And I'll be honest, I don't recall hearing a soundtrack. If there was one it was apparently incredibly unobtrusive.

Truly, for a relatively low budget film, it doesn't really look that way. And if it wasn't for the dullness of the first part, I think this would have been a far superior film. I think there's a lot of talent here, and I'm hopeful that Kendra has more opportunities.

I didn't really know much about "Goddess of Love" prior to sitting down to watch it, after I had happened to come across it by sheer blind luck. I read the synopsis, and thought it sounded like it had potential to be a great movie, perhaps sort of a mixture of a revenge movie and thrown in with some of the psychotic madness as seen in movies such as "May".

After having seen "Goddess of Love", I will say that writers Alexis Kendra and Jon Knautz certainly had some interesting ideas and Jon Knautz also managed to bring many of these elegantly to life on the screen. However, the movie just lacked a more intense pace. The storyline was good, but it just suffered under a very slow paced progress.

And speaking of the storyline, then there were some really interesting aspects to the storyline in terms of Venus's slow decent as her mind and psyche slowly starts to crumble and come apart. But there is more, there were also some really nice twists to the storyline along the way; twists that you don't really see coming. And on that account, the writers really did a phenomenal job.

"Goddess of Love" has some very good acting performances, and the movie is really carried a great long way by the talented cast they had hired for the various roles in this movie. Most impressive was Alexis Kendra in the lead role as Venus. She really carried the movie well, and she put on a very memorable performance.

This movie really had potential to be a very unique and outstanding movie, but it was just brutally butchered by a way too slow paced storytelling. It was a shame, truly, because I did enjoy the storyline and the acting, but it was the lack of proper pace to the storyline that just killed it off for me. As such, the movie settles on a mediocre 5 out of 10 stars rating from me.

A disturbing movie with an absolutely kickass and brave central performance, this should be much more widely known than it is. You won't be able to look away. Makes Fatal Attraction seem like Bambi. Very, very nicely done.