Teeming with ambition, shockingly going where no porn tape has ever gone before, Thomas Zupko's self-described revenge on his Roman Catholic upbringing is without question a highly distinctive slab of smut, unlike anything your customers have ever before viewed.

But with its long-winded metaphysical rantings, masturbatory-distracting gross-out images (lepers, rotting, bloody cocks, etc.) and sex that while brutally depraved (quasi-rape scenes essentially), frequently doesn't come to a full-on boil, In the Days of Whore is a flawed, only partially successful production.

Still, one must admire it for its sheer audacity, breadth of vision and the obvious way Zupko poured his heart and twisted-by-Christianity soul into it. There's more going on here than in ten other videos combined. Pre-nom the tape for Best Video Feature, Best Art Direction - Video, Best Screenplay - Video and Best Musical Score, Zupko for Best Director - Video and the daring closer (see below) for Best Anal Sex Scene - Video and/or Best Group Sex Scene - Video. If AVN gave out a Best Makeup award, Whore would get pre-nommed there too for its very convincing lepers.

Set in the 13th Century, it tells the story of King Simon (Anthony Crane), who is deposed of his crown by his scheming son after contracting leprosy from a - what else? - whore, then exiled to an island of lepers to live out his days and plot his revenge.

Typical of Whore's sexual depravity is scene two, which has lepers Crane and Tyce Buné d.p.'ing Bridgett Kerkove until Buné's decaying dick breaks off in her asshole. Undeterred, she grabs the bloody thing by the root and finishes the job herself. Unique? Without question. Strokable? It would have been much more so without the over-the-top stuff for sure.

The tape's sexual centerpiece is the closer, one of the most ambitiously choreographed sex scenes - not to mention most blasphemous and anal-intensive - ever committed to videotape. Shot in an honest-to-goodness real church, it has Kristi Myst's bum at first being ravaged by three crazed Vikings as a small army of cloaked monks look on from pews. She's then dragged into a back room, where they plunder her ass all over again, periodically shoving her head into a vat of blood-colored water, and then creaming her face. End of scene, right? Wrong.

Now the monks get into the act, subjecting Myst's extremely raw rectum to yet more reaming (Myst deserves a best starlet pre-nom based on this scene alone), then blessing her comely kisser with their own hot holy ointments, which are scooped into her mouth with a crucifix, then washed off with piss.

As grandiose as the scene is, however, it, like much of the sex before it, including pretty girl Taylor St. Clair's hardest, most squalid action to date (she'll never be thought of as white bread again), never quite reaches raging, white-heat rank. Nonetheless, it - as well as the tape - stays burned in one's memory banks, a rare achievement in this era of 10,000 annual releases.