Director Tom Zupko may or may not know what the hell this muddled, pretentious production is supposed to be about. But one thing's for certain: the average porn hound sure as shit won't. And even if he did, he wouldn't give a fast-forwardable damn.

As affected as the most pseudo-intellectual student film, the weighty, frequently annoying (it's subtitled, for Crissakes) Abyss tells the drawn-out tale of four Czarist-era Russian officers framed by a rival and ultimately executed for a string of prostitute murders. Before being shot, they gang-bang a foul-mouthed Virgin Mary (Kristi Myst) who tells them that "God is dead" and who, after their deaths, reviles them cause they can no longer get it up. Huh?

Perhaps feeling the need to explain the none-too-apparent profundity of the preceding two hours, Zupko, all Nietzsche-like, tells us in a vid-ending bit of heavy bummer-ness that "there is nothing like suffering, injustice and despair; It is what makes us human. It is God's greatest gift and the sole purpose for our creation."

Gee, and here we thought it was jerking off to fuck flicks.

Speaking of which, let's, shall we, jump-cut to the sex, which, not surprisingly, is a marked improvement over the script and which, all by its lonesome, accounts for Abyss's marginally-above-average rating.

Anchored by a pair of smokin' fiveways (four guys on, respectively, Myst and some slutty brunette fuck toy), the anal-intensive pillaging is raunchy and strokable damn near from start to finish in Extreme's customary ultra-hard-edged fashion (choking, gagging, spitting, verbal degradation).

But as is his wont, Zupko can't resist letting his affectations get in the way of the sex too, namely the closer, in which Myst's Virgin Mary distracts from her own multiple plundering by continuously babbling at the top of her considerably fake lungs "there is no fucking God." Hey Kristi. Shut the fuck up and just, well, uh, fuck. Oh well, it's not your fault.

Yes, Zupko has ambition and vision. But someone clearly needs to rein in his pretensions. You listening, Rob and Tom?