Dungeon of Desire

With the title of Dungeon of Desire, one could be forgiven for imagining that this soft porn film would contain elements of kidnapping, bondage and sex, all wrapped up in a story of forbidden love and medieval daring-do. Well, up to a point these elements are there but unfortunately the end result is rather lack-lustre.

The story starts in modern LA when three women, a photographer and two models are sent on an assignment to a large mansion. Investigating the cellar, they inadvertently find themselves transported back in time to medieval Europe. It says a lot about the tolerance of those old Europeans that they take the sudden arrival of three scantily clad women all in their stride. Black lace underwear and silk body-stockings barely raise an eyebrow - or indeed anything else. Jill (Regina Russell) draws the short straw and finds herself working in the kitchen while Carrie (Michelle Turner) and Vickie (Amber Newman) get to cavort in various states of undress with Princess Gwen (Mia). Gwen's secret affair with Eric (Ed Johnson) is constantly being thwarted by Queen Aura (Vanessa Blair) but as the old saying goes, love will find a way and they all live happily ever after.

It is good to know that someone put in the effort of trying to write a decent script and using appropriate costumes. The sets looked good too. However, the sex action in this soft porn film left a lot to be desired. The love scene between Gwen and Eric amounted to little more than kissing and cuddling despite them both getting undressed. The final sex scene which necessitated most of the characters having lots of sex did not amount to much either. There was a lot of missed potential so only 3 stars.

This is a Z sexploitation film with time traveling (the scene with cheap special effects made me laugh) and the most badly written dialogues you may expect (imagine people in middle ages talking as if they were porn actors or pimps). Sets are cheap, and actors are as awful as usual (Mia Zottoli is particularly unskilled) in this kind of low budget exploitation. Everytging is very unconvincing. Though, curiously, the script is not just a sequence of excuse for softcore sex, but a true and seriously failing medieval fantasy story. This involves a magic chastity belt, an evil queen conspiring against the princess, inquisition and witch-hunting, a wizard with a goatee, and so forth.

Others have commented that the sex scenes here are on the light side, really nothing more than introductions to what you'd normally expect from these Skinemax positioned movies.

Anything you can see 24 years later from DVDs or downloads only runs seventy-three minutes, when all these productions normally ran ninety minutes to two hours. So this was likely a 90 minute straight to cable film from which 20 or more minutes of the softcore sex scenes were cut for the DVD, and that DVD version sourced everything else you can find. I've found that the DVD releases of these films were often cut down in that manner so they could be sold on Amazon.

There is some nudity, and five very attractive actresses. All of them get out of their clothes from time to time, but nothing very much interesting happens when they do.

The plot itself is fairly pedestrian, although a good bit of effort went into (somewhat) period costumes. But since all the actors are at the Skinemax skill level, the straight part of the movie can't really carry it.

By the way, the "Dungeon" has very little to do with the story.