Well, of course it can't hold a candle to Scorcese' s Goodfellas, which director Luciano has loosely patterned it after. This is a porno after all, and comparisons to mainstream movies with vastly larger budgets are inherently unfair.

But Bound by Blood, believe it or not, is superior to Goodfellas, The Godfather and every other Hollywood gangster movie ever made in one distinctive way. It breaks new ground, going where those mainstream films can't for obvious reasons, by graphically depicting the use of sex as a mobster's choice weapon of revenge.

The tape's last two sequences contain gut-wrenching rape scenes where the female characters, played by Jewel De'Nyle and Jessica Darlin, are violated by multiple thugs seeking retaliation against their hated rivals. They ain't pretty, but they are powerful and undoubtedly true-to-life. Strokable too, for those into sexual assault fantasies (fantasies, o.k. Not the real thing. Friggin' relax).

Another believe it or not about BBB is that it's essentially a couples tape. Yeah, you read right. A couples tape from Extreme (all right, an edgy couples tape).

It has an episodic storyline about Luciano, his crew, their women and their enemies and two of the sex scenes - a Claudio/Kristi Myst/Nikita Denise threeway and a Jessica Darlin hetero pairing - are shot in a distinctively softer style than one normally expects from Extreme. Kudos to Luciano, who shows new range as a director, demonstrating he's not just about ultra hard wall-to-wall fare such as Anal Asspirations.

Even so, not forgetting his company's traditional single-stroker base, Looch throws in a couple of uh, extremely messy facials (Samantha Stylle in the opener and De'Nyle in scene two) on top of those aforementioned scenes of brutal sexual violation.

Now, while the sex is superior to that in any tinstletown gangster flick, the tape's much ballyhooed violence can't hold a candle. It looks, for the most part, unconvincingly staged, with, for instance, a supposed baseball bat used in the closer quite obviously made out of Styrofoam or some such substance. Still, for those into it, there's more staged violence here than perhaps in any other porn production ever made.

Pre-Nom Luciano for Best Director - Video; AVN performer of the year and co-producer De'Nyle for Best Actress - Video - for her portrayal, in a role that fits her like a glove, of a mobster's wife; and those two softer scenes for Best Couples Scenes - Video.