I don't think so. You have to mount some form of supported file system. You can mount a file that is an image of a disk if that file has been formatted in any of the supported formats. You do this by using a loop device. (/dev/loop0, /dev/loop1, ... /dev/loop7)
Example: If you have a disk image created with dd called dd.image you can mount this to /mnt using this command.
Code:
mount -o loop dd.image /mnt
I don't believe that you can pipe that file through gunzip to preprocess it. I believe that you have to mount an unzipped image file.