Sacred Sin

Starring [Heather Vuur], [Jassie], [Dee], [A.J. Bailey], Brooke, Nevaeh, [Monica Mayhem], [Ruby Flame], [Nick Manning], [Jean Val Jean], [Scott Nails], [Sledge Hammer] and [Jeremy Steele]

The first thing to be said about Sacred Sin is that if you are the sort of person who believes that porn and religion should not mix, then you should probably not watch Sacred Sin. It is a story of loss, betrayal, faith, damnation, and any number of other thorny issues, and it takes its religion a little more seriously than, say, Devil In Miss Jones 3. If you're not comfortable with a porn star holding an actual bible, or porn with crucifixion imagery, Sacred Sin might not be the movie for you.

The second thing to be said about Sacred Sin is that if you don't like violence mixed with your porn, you might want to give this one a miss as well - there's a fairly graphic scene of some she-devils sewing a priest's mouth and eyes shut (cf. the first thing to be said about Sacred Sin), as well as what appears to be a scene in which Dee is raped by a demon. The rape isn't really all that rapey - she appears to enjoy it quite a bit - but still, demon.

Those things said, the third thing to be said about Sacred Sin is that it is certainly some sophisticated porn. Ninn's story, which is more than a little open to interpretation, centers around an unsolved 19th-century mystery, a modern-day tragedy, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. Particularly intriguing is Ninn's characterization of Lucifer as a misunderstood rebel who brings free will and knowledge instead of as a harbinger of damnation. You can get all that theology in a lot of other places, but not with [Heather Vuur] and [Jassie] and [Dee] and [Monica Mayhem] fucking and sucking their way across the landscape.

Which brings up the fourth thing to be said about Sacred Sin. Let's talk about fucking for a minute. There's not a lot of it, comparatively, in this movie. There was a total of an hour of actual sex, give or take a couple of minutes, depending on where you count the sex as starting; the rest is mostly music-video-style montages of things that only make sense once you've been watching for a long time. The running time is well over two hours, so that leaves a lot of stuff to interpret. It's beautiful and moody and artistic, but it barely qualifies as porn, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you want out of your movie - and if you're buying a [Michael Ninn] film, the chances are good that you're expecting exactly what you're going to get: atmosphere, gorgeous visuals, and pretty people. Word is that Ninn cut the movie for a non-explicit release as well, which explains the sharp division between the hardcore sex scenes and the jittery, montage-style visuals of the remainder of the movie (the extras disc, if you're buying the DVD, contains two deleted blowjob scenes, a bonus scene between Heather and Jassie, and five solo scenes, one from each of the other girls in the film, excepting Dee).

The last thing to be said about Sacred Sin is: Eddie Van Halen. The flap has been very flappy about Eddie contributing a couple of songs to the soundtrack for the movie - if you Google the right combinations of words, you can find legions of fans arguing over whether it's good music or not. There's a lot of fuss about something called a sustainer -everybody, pro and con, seems to be coming out against it - but the truth is that there is really only one EVH song in the movie. It comes during a scene in which Nick Manning, ex-priest turned cop, undergoes some drunken hallucinations in his apartment while he mourns the death of his wife and child at the hands of a felon he had put away some time earlier. I wanted there to be a lot more Eddie, but there's not, although the special features disc has two video versions of the song, "Rise" (one with scenes from the movie and one with nothing but Eddie in the studio) as well as another from Ninn's movie Catherine. The lack of Eddie Van Halen music was what finally scotched my idea of writing a review incorporating the names of every Van Halen song. That and the difficulty of working some of them in - I mean, "Eruption" is easy enough, as is "Girl Gone Bad" and "Sinner's Swing", and "Runnin' with the Devil" would have been a piece of cake, but what are you going to do with "The Full Bug"? Or "Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now"? I ask you.   Collapse.

. It's beautiful and moody and artistic, but it barely qualifies as porn, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you want out of your movie - and if you're buying a Michael Ninn film, the chances are good that you're expecting exactly what you're going to get: atmosphere, gorgeous visuals, and pretty people.... Read the Full Review!