Adult video is not exactly known for its subtlety, so in a feature titled The Puppeteer, whose beautiful opening credits show a pair of hands lovingly crafting a series of marionettes, the audience is not likely to share amnesiac Dale DaBone's puzzlement at the scars he finds on his wrists. They might, however, wonder what Briana Banks is doing on the box cover, when she's barely visible during the first three-quarters of the vid, usually wearing a very strange hat, and only does the final sex scene.

But be that as it may, it's neither the box nor the script that'll have audiences oohing and aahing in their seats, fast-forward buttons forgotten in those spaces between the couch cushions; it's the sex.

Start with a killer coupling between DaBone and Sky Taylor, his girlfriend of exactly one year. (Take our word, those time things always have significance in fantasy features.) DaBone may be having flashbacks of what appears to be a car accident, but that doesn't stop his cock from rising in response to Taylor's poolside oral ministrations. Nor does it affect his ability to perform those in-and-out pushups on the diving board over Taylor's splayed form - and when, still inside, he pulls her up into a lotus position, the pair seem oblivious to the idea that their bouncing could cause them to fall off the board and become just another pair of went-swimming-too-soon-after-sex victims. But once viewers get a look at Taylor's slow, measured gyrations and bounces in the following reverse cowgirl ride, it isn't blood they'll be thinking about, but something smoother and milkier. Call it a pre-nom for Best Couples Scene.

Of course, the couple winds up in that village on Jenkins Pike that DaBone's been dreaming about, and it's a weird place, like something out of Hans Christian Andersen, where it's always 2:57, and where the people move as mechanically as... well, you know.

Fortunately, they don't fuck that way, so check out a decent threeway between Alexandra Nice, Tina Cheri and Lee Stone that features Nice's ass camped on Stone's peg, and a tryst between the little-seen Alexis Amore and Lexington Steele with some piledriver action and a better, longer and even more energetic reverse cowgirl hump on a cowhide rug.

Our other sexual pre-nom, however, is in the Best All-Girl Scene department, with April and Brooklyn Rhodes, dressed in black wigs and identical costumes, pleasuring each other on a wooden staircase. Look for plenty of licks, fingering and scissor action, with which the editor, for some reason decided to screw around visual-effects-wise, but which still packs a good fetish-y punch.

Not to be left out, Taylor finds her own match with a snappily-dressed Mark Davis. The pair get it on in the darkened village streets with reverse cowgirl, horsie and Davis' patented (pending) standing fuck where he supports Taylor's ass as she rides up and down on his cock.

Of course, the finale has to be DaBone and Banks; an all-too-short coupling in her loft featuring 69, pile-driver-like mish and anal mish.

Rounding out our list of pre-noms are Philip O'Toole for Best Videography, Christof for Best Art Direction, and Saint for Best Music.