Figures. No sooner do we wrap up the 2003 AVN Awards than a contender for the 2004 Awards pops into the review closet.

Petra and Nikko Night are bored with their sex lives — or at least she is — and they go to Fantasy Ltd., a company that uses surplus Defense Department technology to implant memories in your brain. Petra and Night are invigorated by their first treatment, where Petra imagines that she tangos with Rafe — first vertically, then horizontally — and Night referees a mud wrestling match between Lezley Zen and Malitia, eventually joining in for some good dirty fun. Petra and Night then start using the technology to explore other fantasies: Petra "explores her femaleness" in a big sudsy tub with Becca Bratt. Knight gets in touch with his feminine side by scientifically constructing his own girltoys, who live to please their man, although they manage to find time to please each other.

Discussing their adventures afterwards, Petra is disdainful of Night's fantasies, calling them shallow and chauvinistic. Night says the problem is that she's uninspired sexually. So Petra rises to the bait by coming up with a sex-slave scenario for Night, and then she pops on a memory-implanting headset and jumps into it herself. But when the fantasy is over, Lee Stone walks into the room and keeps going with her, right in front of Night. Night feels left out until Katie Morgan, the Fantasy Ltd. rep who's been walking them through these reveries, gets in front of Night and starts stripping for him. And then some.

The next morning they wake up — invigorated, horny — and they make love. It wasn't just a dream.

Or was it...?

The sex scenes are stylized and erotic, rather than the documentary-style close-up in-out that pervades many adult productions, even plot-driven ones. Flash-forwards, grainy film-look shots and black-and-white images add interest for the eye while hot tawdry jazzy music seduces the ear.

Pre-noms: First and foremost, Leni Stalinreif and Diego Scazi for editing. Avalon for directing and screenplay, Night and Petra for acting, and Perry Tratt for cinematography/videography (this is a film/video hybrid), and Calamity Jane for Art Direction. And the supercharged four-way near the end for Group Scene.