When's the last time your customers saw a seriously scripted feature with such sordid, decidedly non-couples-friendly touches as scum swapping, gape and glory holes?

Welcome to Patrick Collins' Big Bottom Sadie, which boldly declares that plot-oriented tapes don't always have to be of the sexually middle-of-the-road stripe. BBS, in fact, more closely resembles in sexual tone such Golden Age nasties as Behind the Green Door and Femmes de Sade (targeted, as all features were in those days, at the Pussycat/raincoat crowd) then it does many of the more vanilla-ish features of today.

While it's not as big-budgeted or as impressive production value-wise as today's top drawer features, its raw vitality more than compensates. To make a musical comparison, BBS is to many contemporary features what Collins' gritty blues soundtrack is to, say, the latest over-produced boy band.

In any event, Sadie concerns itself with a subject many of us reading this can all relate to: sexual compulsion.

Portrayed in a nom-worthy lead performance by delectable woman-child Jenna Haze, Amanda has sex on the brain 24/7 but at the same time feels disgusted by her desires. She begins to get in touch with her Inner Slut, however, when she starts rooming with her sexual temperament opposite, the very loose Sadie (Olivia Saint), your basic fuck-anything-that-moves type. Continuing down her path of sexual discovery, Amanda blossoms into a full-fledged mega-whore after, at Sadie's suggestion, she starts attending a sexual dysfunction therapy group headed by headshrinker Herschel Savage (in a nom-worthy Best Supporting Actor performance) and undergoes an S/M session at the hands (and floggers and nipple pumps and mechanical dildos) of Master Ernest Greene.

While such a storyline might seem the stuff of porn cliché, the script, written by Collins (in a rare trip, for the Elegant Angel honcho, to Feature Land) and pal Parker Sherman, infuses it with an uncommon level - for adult - of psychological undercurrent. For instance, when Amanda first joins Savage's group, we cut to her and the other group members all sitting around in a circle, jacking off loudly. Amanda then informs us in voice-over that that was merely how she imagined the group would be, and in reality, it was a lot more staid. Cut to the real group, sitting around talking. And talking only.

What emerges from such writing is a three-dimensional portrait of a young woman struggling and ultimately coming to terms with her sexual identity. And even though the ending is a bit pat, the script nonetheless deserves a pre-nom for Best Screenplay - Video.

As for the sex, well, this may be a feature, but, as we pointed out in our BBS On the Set piece in the June issue, this is an Elegant Angel feature. Which means that not only is the sucking and fucking way nastier than what you're likely to find in just about any other contemporary feature, but there's a lot more of it as well. Sadie has 10 - count 'em 10 - full sex scenes, plus snippets of others. While they tend to be shorter than the sexual opuses Collins normally shoots, they're all solidly strokable, with a couple really standing out.

They include Michele Raven's perversely conceived turn, which combines raunchy sex with violent overtones as two guys punch and kick in the walls of a bathroom stall to produce makeshift glory holes for all of Raven's flesh holes to service. Pre-nom it for Best Group Sex Scene - Video. Pre-nom too in the same category the choke-heavy (the hands around the neck variety) Savage/Raven/Katie Morgan closer.

On a grander scale, pre-nom - as if you couldn't tell by now - Big Bottom Sadie for Best Video Feature and Collins, who in the past has helmed his share of AVN Award-winning Best All-Sex Videos (The Bottom Dweller, Buttwoman vs. Buttwoman, Buttwoman Iz Belladonna), this time for Best Director - Video.