Face slaps, not flowers. Spitting, not sonnets. Choking, not Chianti and Kenny G. And most importantly, animalistic power pounding, not tender, lightweight "love making (yawn)."

All this, as if you didn't know, is Rocco's Way to Love.

The tape, with its vaguely compelling, paper-thin storyline (who killed Kelly Stafford's character?) and beautiful sepia-toned non-sex sequences, represents a bit of a stylistic leap for Siffredi the auteur, but with any porn vid - most especially with a Siffredi vid - the sex is the thing.

Though the five or so group gropes are wantonly depraved and imaginatively structured in that distinctive Siffredi fashion his fans (i.e., a good part of your client base) eat up, they are for the most part only modestly energized and as a result, don't flat-out scald like the best of his huge, award-winning body of work.

Not that RWTL doesn't have some white-hot moments.

Check our for instance, gorgeous Catherine Count, looking all Domme-like in leather trenchcoat, black patent leather spikes and titty-baring latex top, wailing like a dying banshee as Rocco rips into her delectable derriere in the opening fiveway.

But then there's less sexually-realized scenes like the closer, in which the attractive Stafford gets bukkakized in front of a candle-lit St. Andrews cross in the woods in the middle of the night. While the set-up is unique and Stafford - who is quite obviously extremely perverse - is way more animated than the typical lifeless bukkake bitch, the heat, due to the (all-too-typical) mechanical nature of the group face-frosting drill, never rises above novelty-scene-warm. Neither does it in Stafford's very rough one-on-one coda with Siffredi, which may be the closest thing he's ever done to a couples scene for Evil Angel (an adventuresome couples scene, to be sure). Still, it's an uncommonly emotionally intimate scene for a porno and as such, deserves a pre-nom for Best Couples Sex Scene - Video.

Bottom line? Only moderately hot Rocco rocks harder than just about everyone else at the top of their game, hence RWTL's AAAA rating.