Pretentious mishmash of religion, explicit sex and Gothic horror/gore

Sycophantic praise clearly went to the head of pornographer Michael Ninn, who after making some fine films in the '90s later descended to pretentious crap like "Sacred Sin" and his recent Dorcel projects. 

This effort did win several of those meaningless Adult industry awards, but is pure shite (as the Irish might say), despite the contribution of some mainstream heavyweights behind the camera. Rock star Eddie Van Halen served as executive producer and contributed with Loren Alexander to the musical score, while Ed French brought his well-honed horror expertise to the highly professional and arresting special makeup effects and gore. But Ninn and co-writer "L.E. Smith" fashioned a horrible screenplay that pretends we're not watching porn, but rather some ill-conceived philosophical Gothic Horror film.

The cast mainly delivers monotone, boring acting performances (of course, Adult actors can hump with skill once the sex begins) except for star Heather Vuur, who boasts of her acting training in the 72-minute BTS and delivers the tortured prose monologues with conviction.

She plays sort of a ghost/immortal who killed her husband Jean Val Jean when catching him humping their maid Jassie, and then committing suicide in a period-dress prologue. She makes the case for Lucifer/Satan, arguing for man's freedom while following the Fallen Angel, rather than staying on the straight and narrow of worshiping God as per organized religions.

Her adversary is a miscast Nick Manning playing a police lieutenant who drives a flashy convertible sports car - he should have been assigned a Barracuda as Adult's answer to Touch Connors as TV's immortal "Mannix".

The connection between them is as strained as the would-be philosophical ramblings of the script: Heather went on her killing spree four years after the death of her son, while Nick is still carrying a torch for his dead wife Brooke (a smashing beauty who steals the film in her scenes from star Heather). Feature is awkwardly structured around scenes of Nick getting drunk, with Heather giving him a hard time by having him relive sex with his dead bride Brooke, a flashy outdoor XXX scene in which she wears a beautiful wedding dress to add another fetish to the proceedings.

Subplots are introduced in order to get the requisite porn content into a film that drags on and on in its non-sex scenes in a way that makes it quite dated for today's wall-to-wall fans. Silliest such tangent has the beautiful Dee kidnapped and then subjected by Heather's cult to forced sex with The Beast, a horned, muscular brute with terrific makeup effects played by the late Sledge Hammer. That scene could easily be anthologized and salvaged from this horrible mess of a feature, and probably will be someday.

Lots of work went into crafting this junker, clearly designed to impress the easily impressed (viz, gatekeepers who devise those bogus industry awards). Non-ending is extremely hard to swallow.

With Van Halen's name attached and a unique selling point (few if any mainstream greats would deign to use their real name in association with porn) I wasn't surprised that several scenes devolve into glorified music videos. The musical score, with its religious choral passages and hard rock moments, never achieves the lyrical beauty of those classic Adult scores by Saint (Christopher Saint Booth) that were so important in the success of dozens of Adam & Eve romantic couples films released around the turn of this century.

Worst scene shares with Ninn's later disaster "The Four" in being presented in Blurrovision, out-of-focus exterior "romantic" footage that turns into crisp focus when it comes time for the explicit sex portion to begin. I'm way too old to suffer through such eye strain, whether in a mainstream, avant garde or Adult project.

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An adult film mishmash of erotica with gothic horror, including a few songs by the late Eddie Van Halen.

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Sacred Sin

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