Unhung Hero
US | 2013 | Directed by Brian Spitz
Logline: A young man embarks on a quest to rationalise his obsession with his penis size, or lack thereof.
Patrick Moote has a small dick. But he’s a nice guy, and he doesn’t understand why there are such huge social implications to having a tiny package. His fiancée dumped him when he proposed on national television. She told him later it was because he had a small John Thomas. Women can be so cruel! So Patrick grabbed debut director Spitz and head off into the great unknown to discover why humankind are so obsessed with schlong size. The short answer is that we live in a modern world that has been pornofied. But it goes deeper than that. Patrick pulls out many shortcomings, but also gains enlightenment with serious girth. He even scores a cool new girlfriend. Go Patrick, it ain’t the size of your boat, it’s the motion of the ocean!
For much of this rather endearing, and frequently funny “cockumentary” (as Patrick coins it) I was convinced it was another one of those elaborate faux documentaries, like Babelfish from a few years back. But by the end I decided it probably was real, and Brian Spitz just happened to be very lucky with the footage he got. Either that, or he paid off a number of people to get some of those dramatic moments on tape. Either way, Unhung Hero is one of the more original cringe inducing, cheeky grin documentaries of recent years. My only real gripe is that we never actually got to see or even get told just how small Patrick’s weiner was! Oh, the humanity!
Unhung Hero screens as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, Saturday 7 September, 4:30pm, Cinema Two, The Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
The Final Member
Canada | 2012 | Directed by Jonah Bekhor & Zach Math
Logline: The quest for a museum owner to find the final specimen to complete his extensive array of phalluses.
There is a museum called the Icelandic Phallological Museum, it is the world’s only exhibition space dedicated to the appendage we know as the penis, and owner, operator and dick obsessive Siggi Hjartarson, now aged 70, has garnered an extensive collection over the past thirty years. He has everything from a bull’s penis bone to an enormous sperm whale schlong (only a third of it, and still bigger than a small man!), but he has yet to acquire the penis of a man.
Enter Tom, the strange American, and Pall, the Icelandic womanizer. Tom is middle-aged and is quietly desperate to give Elmo, his ample member, the fame he feels it deserves. He intends to have him removed and donated to Siggi’s museum. Pall, on the other hand, will offer his penis to Siggi post death. The race is on.
The Final Member is one of those utterly charming, wonderfully peculiar discoveries. It doesn’t attempt to be anything other than what it is, and it’s something completely unique, blackly comic, and rather bizarre; as slight as it is profound. It is the tale of Siggi and Tom, two phallus-obsessed aging men, grappling with the deeper meaning of manhood, and the elusive masculinity of being cocksure.
The Final Member screens as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, Sunday 8 September, 5pm, Cinema Three, The Factory Theatre, Marrickville.