The Worst Idea Of All Time - 01: Oh come, O come Emmanuel

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Guy and Tim are BACK! 52 watches of Grown Ups 2. Sex and The City 2. WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS. Sex and The City: The Movie. And now we are throwing ourselves into the Emmanuelle series - a longstanding erotic cinematic universe which starts with 1974's 'Emmanuelle' directed by Frenchman Just Jaeckin (honestly). We dig into the difficulty with assessing foreign films, the allure of squash and Guy introduces Boner Patrol - a segment Tim hopes never returns. Also, we explore exactly that goes on in First Class and what IT is WILL SHOCK YOU (it's sex). It's the first step on a brand new season of The Worst Idea of All Time.JOIN US ON FACEBOOK: facebook.com/WorstIdeaOfAllTimeSUPPORT US ON PATREON: patreon.com/TWIOATVISIT THE LITTLE EMPIRE PODCAST NETWORK: littleempirepodcasts.comMUSIC CREDIT: Tender Moonlight (facebook.com/TenderMoonlight)ART CREDIT: Tomas Cottle (sick-days.com) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Tim and Guy here, and welcome to the Worst Idea of All Time, Season 5. This season we are watching the French-originated softcore pornography series, Emmanuel. Because why not? These films contain some anachronistic and downright problematic scenes from time to time. Which we will not be discussing, to keep our podcast a stupid and friendly place to be. Also, you do not need to watch these films as always so just enjoy the show we're watching the movies so you don't have to happy listening everybody Hello and welcome to the first episode of a brand new season of sexual exploits. That's right. And film.

Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel. As I once sang at the chapel of the Anglican school that I spent my formative years from 5 to 18. Let's do a slight retrospective and take stock. The year is 2014 in the month of February. stock the year is 2014 in the month of february guy montgomery has just been fired from tv because they pulled the channel that he was working at off the i wasn't fired that's the biggest version of fired there could be you did so poorly at your job that they torpedoed the entire station yeah i guess the network remained. I guess nothing.

That's what happened. These are facts. This is on the historical record. You can check it on Wikipedia. Fucking lay it on me, bro. So, what happens next? Tim and Guy, who had struck up a pretty plucky friendship

through the course of that show with Tim coming in to review public restrooms a la The Lou Review on every Monday evening, plugging it, like it still exists, it's been gone for six years,

check it out on YouTube, gotta get those views up, so we were like, we wanna do something, and that thing, was the worst idea, of all time, grown ups too,

52 times, week after week, we did it, sex in the city too, 52 times, week after week, we did it, we are your friends, 60 times, because you're. Week after week, we did it. We are your friends.

60 times? Because you're a fuck. Yeah, we did it. Sex in the City 1 or Sex in the City, the movie, 52 times. We did it. Home Alone 3, as the world looked on from quarantine, 10 times. That feels right to me. We did it, an emergency season. Cats, 7 times in 7 days. That feels right to me.

Cats. We did it. Dr. Dolittle. Three times, one day, one cinema. We did it. And now, we turn our attention to the Emmanuel series. The Emmanuel series. It's a series of French softcore pornography films that I was introduced to as a teen on a channel called Sky One, which is Sky was like our shitty primitive version of pay-per-view,

which has grown into a proper version of cable television. But this was back in the days of these very hokey consoles. There was a card that had to be plugged in for it to work the remote was very unresponsive famously terrible remote very scary stuff so every friday at midnight sky one used to have these after midnight screenings of various different soft core pornography franchises if you were lucky you'd have a sky console in your house and everyone in your house would go to bed around 10 10 30 11 p.m if you were somewhat lucky but less lucky you'd have a friend with a console who'd organize sleepovers on friday and hopefully

everyone in their house would go to bed around 10 10 30 p.m they're not stress this enough this was not pre-internet days but this was at a time when we were dealing with dial-up modems the the ways that people were consuming their pornography hiding magazines magazines in a park i remember at one point i was this would have been in the early days of the internet, of my relationship with the internet. We, of course, we had the family computer. Everyone had to be out of their house for you to use the family computer for your disgusting, nefarious deeds. The family computer.

What a concept. And I remember, truly what a concept. How's everyone going to get what they need out of that one computer? I know. People got to have their own computers. It could do a lot less back then, though, as well. But I played a game of Tetris where I would control. You know, I love Tetris.

I used to play it on my Game Boy. Tetris blast. And I turned my hand to the pornographic world of Tetris where if you cleared all the lines, then a sort of pixelated version of a semi-nude lady would render itself. Where the shit did you get that? Crispy. I mean, God knows what sort of weird 8-bit pornography sites I was poking around.

That's insane. To be how I wet my toes in the waters of sexuality. But it was this working in tandem with these after midnight screenings of, there was another one called the switch or the remote or click or something where there was a remote the adam sandler thing well yeah obviously i vividly remember masturbating to that furiously all day but there was another friend there was a it was disgusting there was a remote that controlled the the sexual impulses of one of the characters. Emmanuel was a softer French version of a pornography franchise. This is not penetrative pornography.

This is very artful, almost tasteful. I think it got less so. We've just watched the first one. 1974, I believe, is the year of release. 77? 1974, I believe, is the year of release. 77? I thought it said it on the very legal way we watch the movie in the synopsis.

No, this is 1974. Very big pardon. Well, because the other film that we were legally trying to watch, legally. Which is the third one. Yeah, which was 1970. And that's what it said. So we watched the first film in the Emmanuel franchise, directed by a French director whose name is, and I'm not kidding, Just Jacquin.

Just Jacquin. Yeah. And it is a film about a young French woman whose husband works for some sort of French embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. She travels. It's not explicitly clear the purpose of the travel. Whether or not it's specifically to see him or to travel to Bangkok and have her sexual horizons opened and explored. It has a 90 minute and 34 second run time.

On the whole, pretty great movie it's quite fun to watch fun to watch because it had a lot of cool like 70s stuff in it like um really cool old music yeah beautiful music uh also uh soft focus soft focused soft kind of that sort of vas on the lens Also Soft focus Soft focus Soft Kind of that That sort of Vase on the lens glow That I think we're going to see For a lot of these movies Where everything looks

Just a little bit Kind of Nice and Sort of dripping In sexy nostalgia For a time I don't remember And a place I have not been Sensuality

But in essence Emmanmanuel travels to meet her beautiful french beautiful and horny french husband who he sort of purports to be all about open sexuality and you know love is pleasure and we must continue to explore the depths of pleasure to truly realize our love i thought he was, and she announces that he's 32, and I am 32, and I took it as a real personal affront. Of course. You're not, you know, spearheading some sort of open-minded,

sexually exploit, you know, carnival at a French embassy in Bangkok. I'm not. That has a certain look to it. It takes years off you. Yeah, you're in a fucking podcast studio in Grayland, Auckland, New Zealand with me having watched a softcore pornography at the crisp time of 10.30am on a Thursday morning. So I suppose analysis of the film is a pressing issue.

It's essentially what brings us together as we journey through this franchise yeah we're going to watch all of these there's 50 or so it's a lot it's a lot of emmanuelle and i wonder is it like bond where it's kind of all called emmanuelle and the lead is emmanuelle but they don't necessarily stitch together perfectly. But it's almost exactly like that. But I believe that the franchise is paired off or paired down and taken to America. And so while they're technically canon Emmanuel films,

the further along you go, I happen to know that the franchise makes it into space. Yes. I don't know what language they speak in space, but I imagine that there'll be some Americanized versions of the franchise. I actually was just in researching this. In Italy, they were such fans of the film that they wanted to capitalize on the international popularity of it

by making a similar product that could be made cheaply. And to navigate copyright, they created a series called Black Emmanuel and changed the spelling of emmanuel oh and then also there was a british there was a pet do you know there's a parody of this movie no so there's a long-standing uh film series called the carry-on franchise which are these british comedy pictures they made 31 of them from 1958 to 1992 so after the bond films this is the second longest running series of british films that have been

created and they made a carry-on emmanuel film which has been uh widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever like it's quite hard to do a parody of a softcore porn do you know okay here's a question this movie that we've just watched would you describe it as an erotic film or as softcore pornography because i would actually say that this film is erotica it's it's got a storyline and people are good at acting and there's lots of good technical elements of filmmaking all brought together. What's the storyline? now would clearly identify as bad and wrong but also taking some confidence and gusto

into the whole affair herself and leading the charge passion a lot of women playing a lot of squash figuring out what you can eat in Thailand get on a boat chuck some pho in your face. Hook up with an archaeologist.

Who is a woman. Yeah. She throws herself into the waters of sexual exploration with admirable gusto. And, I mean, I understand what you're saying. I struggle to... Maybe it is erotica. I mean, beyond a character exploring their own sexuality through a variety of sex scenes,

there is no other storyline. You know, so in that respect, I think it might be softcore pornography because the express purpose of the story is to put emmanuel in as many situations as possible for her to enjoy her sexuality yeah but i don't think that's what pornography pornography is is what you're designed to it's something pornographic yeah it's something designed to jerk off to or flip your being to or whatever you want to do. Yeah. But this, I feel like, isn't that.

It provides opportunities for you to jack it if you wish. Gentleman's choice. But I suppose the difference is that hypothetically, once you've finished jacking it, instead of closing the laptop screen and shivering in shame, you continue to watch the film for you know the for the story which i'll personally say last time i watched a pornographic video i did not stick around to see how things shook out well you did this after i was finished which i think makes it erotica i wanted to know

what happened to it like what was going to happen with her and her husband. Okay, so it starts with her and her husband, and then there's a selection of women who are sort of almost deputants. These French women who live in Bangkok, and they just sort of lay about not doing a lot, and that really irks Emmanuelle. She sort of has a desire to fill her time and her days with something else, something with a bit of meaning, a bit of adventure. And so off the back of that, she kind of goes out and seeks out something else.

And her husband, I think, puts her in touch with a selection of other women. And then eventually her path crosses with this guy whose name I never captured. But he's sort of a... Mario. The older gentleman right yeah the old guy not a gentleman guy he mates two young thai boys beat the shit out of each other and then the victor gets to have sex with emmanuel because suddenly she's like his ward for about he essentially sort of marches her around the it's very 50 Fifty Shades of Grey, I think, having not seen or read any of that franchise.

Yeah, it's pretty gnarly. He marches her around the back streets of Bangkok, sort of under the banner of helping her realise the full extent of her sexuality. This guy's against monogamy. He thinks you've got to cast aside the idea of couples. But that's just a French thing. He keeps saying that a third person

has to be introduced with force. He's insisted upon this. I don't fully know what that means either. I am afraid that I might and it's disagreeable in the most high. But I feel like they do it at the end and all three people seem to be there by choice, not force.

Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention. I just... He takes her to an opium den. That was fun. Yeah, he takes her to an opium den where he sort of... Oh, and then it gets not fun. Yeah, he gets her high on opium. It ends not fun.

In my limited research I've done between watching the film and recording this, which was about half a minute on the Wikipedia page, there was not outcry but there's this has been analyzed by uh feminist scholars this text oh wow really it represents something more than just a skin flick like this is uh this is what i'm saying it's erotica well there was this was a commercial success this film uh well yeah it spawned like 49 sequels must have been a success underneath box office it says it made 11.5 million dollars in the united states like roger ebert reviewed this movie this is how the movie was released was beyond just being a porno it was like this

is a movie yeah it also under box office has listed 8 million893,996,000 admissions in France. Cool. Tickets sold, I guess. 8 million tickets sold. Just in France. How many people are in France in the 70s? That's awesome. It sounds like a lot of them.

That's twice the population of New Zealand. Heading down to the cinema. Just to see Emmanuel. What I like about this movie as well is that the actor portraying Emmanuelle is undeniably good-looking, very attractive woman, but she's constantly, just like the movie, at every turn has to tell you how unworldly beautiful she is. Yes.

This film is populated by beautiful people, but Emmanuelle in particular is singled out for her beauty. Essentially, anyone who comes across Emmanuelle has an overwhelming desire to bed her. And she, in turn, the relationship, there's some sort of point of contention between her and her husband where her husband says, hey, I'm a cool guy. I've got an open mind.

I'm a cool guy. I've got a moustache. I'm 32 years old, and I look like I'm 50 but very debonair my wife fucks who she wants I fuck who I want and we're both adults we're both

totally cool about it and then and he drives a possibly MG midget which is painted the wrong colour

it's like a puke lime it's not a puke lime it's a sort of it's not puke lime it's not a puke lime it's a sort of um it's not puke lime it's lime i like that car i'd drive that car i got a mustache i'm about to turn 32 it's a cool car but it's the wrong color is all i'm saying all i'm saying is the color is why the car is so cool okay anyway there's a point of continuing he says says, hey, I do what I want, you do what we want, we're both cool. I do what I want, you do what we want.

Yeah. And eventually, Emmanuel takes him up on this and sort of pulling at these loose threads of sexuality and wanting to find herself and have an experience. She runs off with this woman who is, when she's first introduced to what Tim describes as debutantes, this sort of bevy of beautiful French women who I believe are cast as the husbands of various different French emissaries who live in Bangkok.

There's one on the other side of the pool. And Emmanuelle says, who's that? And one of them says, that's Bea. We don't talk to Bea. And Emmanuelle is... She's not part of our group. Yeah. She's drawn to Bea.

And eventually, her and Bea, her first genuine expression of freedom in Bangkok is instead of returning to the house, as she does every night for dinner with her husband, her and Bea, she's like realizing herself within the freedom. She says, hey, I'm free to do what I want. And she goes away with Bea, who's an archaeologist, the only working woman in the group. And they go to her site of archaeology, which appears to be building a house somewhere out in the sticks of bangkok yeah and instead of letting b do her job she seduces her and they have a very like christmas jones version of being a archaeologist if you are familiar with yeah i understand that the archaeology unions were absolutely up in arms upon the release of emmanuel uh for they felt misrepresented and i don't think they've been as cross as that

Until Indiana Jones came out And they went we do not use whips It would break the stuff we're trying to find Something we don't do is we don't just allow anyone To come into our sights and seduce us And we don't use whips We don't use whips We use guns

It's the 90s, 80s Well in this case it's the 70s and today but when when she is finally exploring her freedom the husband who's presented himself as being quite a cool open-minded guy all of a sudden gets quite terse and he's frustrated he's upset but then he almost does some growth and exploring and realizes it's unreasonable of him and when she comes back to go on this uh sort of getaway overnight with b who she's sort of emmanuel's become quite obsessed with she blows off a date with this older sort of figure mario and mario shows up we don't see this it's explained mario shows up to the house when

she's gone and the husband sees him and goes she's not here mario goes oh damn and he goes it's okay come back another time when she's here and so she returns from her affair with b where she falls in love with b within a night and b says i like you which means i don't want to hurt you but it means i don't love you and emmanuel is humiliated and she returns home and her husband says hey i know what you need you need to go out with this fucking guy mario he's gonna he's gonna fucking he's gonna he knows and then she does and that's when we get to that the already described scene of mario sort of ushering emmanuel through the the back streets of bangkok taking to an opium den taking her to a dinner to dinner to thai boxing what do you think of squash i want to play it yeah i want to play it in the way i imagine it's played which is it's portrayed in a very particular way in this yeah i want to play it the way way I imagine it's played, which is... It's portrayed in a very particular way in this film.

Yeah, I want to play it the way that we play, like the way that people in normal society play squash, which is two rackets, a ball, a scoring system that's all in place. And I also wouldn't mind playing the version represented in Emmanuel, which is two beautiful French women fingering each other on the court. What else is depicted in the film? We've got squash. We've got driving.

Thai boxing. Yeah. Looks quite crazy. They had these big gloves, big, huge gloves, like a rock'em, sock'em robot. Or do you remember those toys when we were kids where you could get those big inflatable gloves and beat the shit out of each other?

Yeah, yeah. I never had them but I always wanted them those toys aren't they just gloves no they're like inflatable ones you blow them up

and they were massive like as big as your head oh okay would they hurt more or less I was wondering that that seems more dangerous

than just boxing gloves yeah I think you could be right on that uh yeah it's I mean like is this what you remembered from the snatches of watching pornography as a child? This was way better.

Is that because you're more mature and so you're watching it with a more open mind than just wanting to see a glimpse of nipple, a touch of pubis? I reckon I was watching the space ones maybe or something the later ones maybe not the space ones exactly but this one like undeniably problematic content within and that actually seems like a um not strong enough word for some of the scenes that are in here but there's like two or three things that are definitely very bad and across the line but the rest of it is um i think quite like tastefully that the whole thing's in french which maybe just elevates any film i have the entire thing i'm a softer critic on foreign language films because if people are speaking in english i can be as judgmental of their performance i like because i understand it but if they're speaking in a foreign language and i'm reading the subtitles in general it will loosen my analysis like it's harder to know

whether or not there's a a duff delivery on a line in a language you don't speak i guess that's true but acting isn't just talking mario is he's in he he's fucking i bought it oh you bought mario i bought mario i really enjoyed I really enjoyed the performance of Emmanuel. Yeah, she was very good too. She's played by a woman named Sylvia Crystal, who is a Dutch actor and is best known for her role within the Emmanuel franchise. Yeah, I would expect that to be true.

She went on to star in, how many of these? A lot. It is like the bond thing she probably took out the most she is the sean connery i know she's best remembered as the eponymous character in five of the seven emmanuel films five of the seven right so this is before it starts spinning off and branching out so there's yeah so there's seven of these French ones. And I also know from my limited research that just Jaquin hands over the directorial reins to a friend of his. He didn't want to become the director of the Emmanuel franchise. And so he hands over to someone who he's obviously approved as being capable of continuing to realize his vision. I want to know about the continuity of the franchise.

I want to know if Emmanuel is the same, is the husband the same? I would love to know if we get visits from minor characters coming through in other movies. Does Mario pop back up in the background of plots for the future ones? Maybe he's in space and he gets trapped outside because he's working on the panelling and the lock freezes up and he can't get back in the ship and he dies out there and everyone's grieving and they get real fucking horny because they hold a little funeral for him.

People grieve in interesting ways. Yes, they do. We're confusing animals, we is. I'd like to introduce a segment I've just thought of. Yeah. Boner Patrol. Okay. Any boners?

Not from me. Neither. There's almost a whisper of a boner at one point on the plane but we got to talk about the plane first of all can i say i hate this segment second of all let's talk about this first class experience i'm not going to ask you why you hate the segment because i have 50 opportunities to do that as the podcast moves forward um so the the plane sequences uh i mean again it's sort of like they're all these people are just constantly throwing themselves at emmanuel and and push it like i feel like she

traveled to bangkok not for the express purpose of exploring her sexuality but upon arrival the cast of characters she meets all impress upon her the importance of exploring her sexuality and this there's a young woman from the group of french debutantes named ange marie ange marie and uh she she she immediately takes a liking to she loves lollipops and she loves to fuck yeah emmanuel is skinny dipping in the pool angie marie sees this she takes her clothes off she goes skinny dipping in the pool she swims up to emmanuel she says i'm going to visit you tomorrow afternoon and Emmanuel says okay and then she arrives they get to talking and out of nowhere really Ange Marie just starts masturbating and she says do you like to touch yourself Emmanuel says yes but not now yeah and then she does anyway yeah

and then Ange Marie says have you really not cheated on your husband? And she says, I said I haven't cheated on my husband in Paris. I love that. She sort of gently places her hand upon her thigh. And then all of a sudden we're cast back into this dream sequence where she's flying in this very lush, spacious, first class plane seat. first class plane seat and she's a sort of very comely gentleman who's sitting in the row in front to the left

and they keep making eyes at each other and she goes and gets a blanket and she pulls the small blanket to cover herself and she pulls it all the way up to just beneath her eyeline and exposes her bare legs and sort of keeps looking at him like and then this guy's

like oh i know what's happening here and i get this i understand without pausing without any consideration for the other passengers who have paid a pretty penny to be flying first class they just begin fucking then and this is something that i got wrong about what the Mile High Club was because my reckoning with it was that you had sex inside of a toilet, usually, somewhere that's cut off, or maybe if you were an air hostess, you had access to some sort of area. If you're cabin crew, not gender specific, you had access to some areas that other people didn't. I did not realize that

if you're in first class you just fuck on the seat in front of everyone else in first yeah you pay for the right different from you and i absolutely different they fuck different and they fly different they do fuck different one thing i will observe about softcore pornography we've got to close the sort of airline experience because there's a whole other subset of sex that happens in first class. But one thing I've observed in this film is that soft core pornography does not care

for the ordinary physics of penetrative sex. No. Every scene in which it's suggested sex is happening, it's impossible to look at without thinking there's no way that penis is hitting that vagina that's good storytelling though because it means you can kind of get better angles of everything else yeah like you can get people of different heights and it also opens the exciting possibility that the version of sex and the reason that all of these

people are on a constant quest for sex in this movie is because all of them are virgins. None of them have figured out how to do it. And they just keep slapping the pubic bone above everyone's genitalia into one another. I think there's a lot of evidence to support that in this movie. A lot of facial expressions that do not match up with what I would observe as what an orgasm looks like when it's happening. They don't match up with what I would observe as what an orgasm looks like when it's happening. It's like being sweaty and being annoyed by a mosquito for an extended period, and then the mosquito leaves.

It's like they're thinking about what it would be like to reach the throes of ecstasy, while instead being like, why doesn't this feel as good as I want it to? While Mario's thrusting his penis into a belly button. Yeah, so anyway, we've got this gentleman comes over and Emmanuel and him just absolutely dry hump the shit out of each other on a plane and then there's another guy at the back of the plane who's watching this happen thinking, that's not how you have sex. I know how you have sex. And after Emmanuel and the first gentleman have finished, he walks up to Emmanuel as she dozes in a sort of frustrated,

not quite post-coital faux nap, lifts her up, takes her to the bathroom, and then performs his version of dry humping in a bathroom. Different, but also wrong. And then that entire reminisce ends as we come back to the present day and Emmanuel sits opposite Ange-Marie and they've both sort of masturbated themselves into a stupor oh she's fallen asleep and they're just sleeping it's a

nice um day with a little breeze going through in bangkok in their uh hut yeah that they're staying in it's a gorgeous scenario that they've it's the the locations are very lush like the film is is beautiful it's beautifully shot the people who populate the film are beautiful and it all flows together it's not a painful watching experience i mean you know god knows what direction this franchise will take us in god knows why we're exploring the entirety of a soft core pornography franchise that I literally only remember in passing from skimming through Sky 1 pornographies after midnight Friday

time will tell if you had to give this movie a score out of 715 what would you give it 600 it's pretty generous it's too high but you know. I'm going to go 585.

585, yeah. I mean, congratulations to the first entry into the Emmanuel franchise. So obviously there's seven of this original block, which are canon, and from there God knows what little tributaries and branches of this particular version of softcore pornography we're going to be launched into. But it's very exciting to be here on the Emmanuel train. And so concludes the first episode of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Is that what we're calling it? Absolutely not. Bye.