"The Package": A Sausage Fest with a Closeted Gay Guy

I'm sorry, but I'm definitely going to watch a movie about a penis, regardless of how bad it is.

Netflix's The Package (2018) is bad.

The premise: three high school buds go on a "bud only" bonding retreat in the mountains:

1. Wimpy Everyman Sean (Daniel Doheny, who played the gay guy in Alex Strangelove.  I didn't watch it due to the homophobia of the title).





2. Ginger chick magnet Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts, who you may remember from Fear the Walking Dead).

















3. Jeremy (Eduardo Franco, who has starred in American Vandal and Adam Ruins Everything), who has long hair, a soft voice, and an online girlfriend that he intends to meet someday, and they'll totally have sex.  Until then he'll live vicariously through the psychic bond with his twin sister -- whenever she has sex with a guy, he feels it.

Got it?  He's gay but doesn't realize it yet.

Sean and Donnie are upset when Jeremy invites two girls along on their retreat, especially because they are Sarah, Donnie's ex-girlfriend, and Becky, Sean's crush.

You know what's going to happen, right?  Some bickering, then hetero-romance will blossom.

But on the way, Jeremy's sausage is accidentally severed!

Jeremy is airlifted to the hospital.  The friends find the penis in the woods (a 6-inch long dildo) and go on a madcap adventure to get it to him within 24 hours, the timeline for reattaching.

It is possible to reattach a severed penis, under very precise conditions.  The cut has to be clean, the penis has to be kept clean, it has to be kept on ice, and you have 4-6 hours to do the job.  This penis goes through so much travail  -- including being bitten by a snake -- that it just wouldn't work, and 24 hours is ridiculous. 

I kept murmuring "That can't happen...that's impossible...no way that would work." 

They end up going to the wrong hospital and attaching the penis to the wrong guy, a redneck whose girlfriend cut his off.

Can't happen. 

But the girlfriend cuts it off again, so they rush to the right hospital and get it connected to Jeremy just in time.

Can't happen.

We never hear anything else from Jeremy; one gets the impression that he was just a maguffin, and the real plot is hetero-romance.  Fade out to boys and girls kissing.



I liked the lack of homophobia in the characters' interactions, a nice change of pace from the blathering of most young adult comedies: "Touching another man is sick!  Disgusting!  I'd rather die!"

And none of the "I am no longer a man"  nonsense.  Jeremy obviously wants his junk back, but he doesn't think he has somehow become a woman.

But no beefcake, no actual, open gay characters, and heteronormativity everywhere you look.  Plus a disbelief that's impossible to suspend.

Can't happen.