In Klimaxx, director Kris Kramski has created a film that's post-modern pornography at its searing best. Kramski is a master of the kind of challenging sexual images that burn themselves into your brain. He's a pornographic stylist with a hard edge.

Real hard.

The film starts off with a scene that straddles the line between kitsch and clever. Two girls in a go-go boots and over-sized sunglasses are in a room littered with urinals. Standing over a pissoir, one girl spreads her legs and pours a brown fluid down her body. It splashes from her crotch, out the pissbowl bottom and on to the girl beneath. Some sticks of dynamite come in handy as dildos until a man enters with a flamethrower. After a few blasts, he gets his cock sucked by one of the girls, then lights her dynamite fuse. After the smoke clears, she's revealed to be a blowup doll. The second girl gets the same fate after he fucks her on a filthy mattress. Corny or clever? You decide.

A hospital room is lit like a scene out of a UFA-era German Expressionist film: Fritz Lang meets "ER." A nude girl lies in a hospital bed, her arms and legs in casts. A nurse enters the room and begins to suck the patient's tits and finger-fuck her pussy. She returns with a doctor and begins to jack him off as they stare at the patient. The doctor then plays with the casted girl until he jerks off on her foot. A second male doctor enters and spreads her legs to fuck her mish, then doggie, and cums on her ass.

A scene shot in the overheated environment of an East European steel foundry is pre-nom worthy. A nude woman enters the factory amid the hydraulic presses and roaring furnaces. She gets down, her muscular body glistening with oil, and soon she's sucking off a sweating, greased workman on the floor as the workers pound the molten metal around them. She fucks the first worker mish, spoon, doggie and upside-down, then sucks a second dick as she continues to get her own furnace stoked. The three-way ends with a double cumshot to her tits. What makes this pre-nom-worthy is that the steel in the background is actually being melted and pounded by real workers! This isn't a fake foundry, and those aren't actors in the background.

The other two sex scenes, a lesbian tow-some laser show, and a scene with a gold-painted couple, fills out the hardcore. The sex is interspersed with some of the startling images for which Kramski is known. A girl, Monti, lies in a tub, her hands bound together, as a discharge of red ink flows from between her legs. The tub water becomes crimson while the voiceover, by Susan Laird, riffs on pornographers and society. Later, the girl is revisited in the same tub, which is now filled with black bathwater.

Kramski has a unique vision which is at times disturbing, but never boring.