James Riley is 26 years old. His only source of income is delivering the local free paper door-to-door. He lives with his Dad and his Dad's girlfriend in Kent. Oh, and he's still a virgin. In the UK, James is outside of the 96% of men who have lost their virginity by 25 and a few years outside the average age of 18 for having sex for the first time. To help overcome his reservations, fears and total inexperience with women, James enrols on a course in Amsterdam run by Aquarian a "school" for men to be coached through intimacy, sexuality and life skills and, if they complete the course then they will lose their virginity to one of the coaches.
Look, I have sympathy with James. I am reasonably rubbish with women socially even if I've never been particularly shy about being naked or having sex, but I was never that sexually active until outside my teenage years. So I do feel for Buffy and X-Files fan James because it is not easy to be a virgin in a society where sex is everywhere. I watched this with this in mind and I do admit that in some ways the "course" was useful to James in building his confidence etc but then on the flip side I varied from laughing to watching open-mouthed throughout this film.
The course itself is a hilariously new-age load of nonsense that I witnessed in a "what a world we live in" way. Women in their fifties, rub James and get him used to being on a bed with a woman etc before, at the end of the course, a (marginally) younger coach "completes" the course with James. It is hilarious but unintentionally so. Then on the other side I struggled to believe what I was watching not in a moral outage way so much as just what I was watching (although it could easily have been the former this show would keep the Daily Mail in "to hell in a handcart" headlines for months). With all the angles of soft-core pornography, we see skinny and pale James masturbated to completion as well as staring deep into an elderly woman's vagina to familiarise himself with it. It is hard to believe you're watching it and harder to understand why.
For all the horrifying images we see, there are plenty of hilarious ones. I know that I should applaud the way James sheds his inhibitions but seeing him stiffly doing a sexless strip dance, it was hard to do anything but laugh and cry at the same time! Speaking of inhibitions, it struck me as very odd that the shy and inexperienced James would allow all this to be filmed and that niggled me all the way through the film because no explanation is offered. So he is nervous about the size of his penis but is happy to let it be broadcast on national television for all to see? Very shy about even being touched by a woman but fine with us all seeing his toes literally curling as he enjoys his first orgasm in the company of someone else? It didn't totally wash with me and just seemed weird. It doesn't help that the film isn't really clear about its aims, because it makes the (quite explicit) sexual nature just seem an end in itself.
Overall then, a hypnotically horrific and unintentionally hilarious film that offers little in the way of interest other than the shock/curiosity value of seeing what you see. The idea of James allowing all this to be filmed doesn't wash with the character we are told he is and director Humphreys doesn't really manage to make it come together on the screen.