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Bare Dick Project, The
Rating: 3 Stars
Produced by Roger Thornhill. Directed by Terrance Hawke and Sam Wo Diamond. Written by Sam Wo Diamond. Starring Sam Wo Diamond, Justin Damon, Jay Lawrence, Joe Montreal, Rod Erickson, Jarrod Gray, Jason Branch, and Terrance Hawke.
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"In December of 1999," we're told, "four cute film students decided to make a documentary about the supposed 'Bare Dick' haunting at the Russian River.... The four disappeared while investigating rumors of strange phenomena in the Bare Forest. Although their footage was later discovered in a small neighborhood theater (the New Meat Campus), their girlfriends never saw them again."

This sometimes incisive parody of The Blair Witch Project is something of a mess (and it's about three film students, not four), but its messiness is in the spirit of the original. It follows the technical conventions of the freak no-budget megahit to hilarious effect, and at the same time manages to be fitfully successful as porn.

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The first sex scene, which seems to have been inserted to lend star power to a project that doesn't necessarily need it, features Jason Branch as a soccer coach recruited to a join a couple of students in a museum reenactment of the first purported "Bare Dick" sighting. Terrance Hawke of San Francisco's New Meat Campus, who presumably directed this epi- sode, appears as a scholar with credentials from the Glans Institute's program in Penile Anthropology. This mildly funny, sexually effective sequence doesn't quite mesh with the rest of Bare Dick, but helps to anchor its motifs of sexual discovery and sexual mentoring.

The most interesting aspect of The Bare Dick Project is its funny, sexy, convincing portrayal of purportedly straight men's discovery of gay sex. Justin Damon, Jay Lawrence, and writer/director Sam Wo Diamond use understated carnal comedy to powerfully erotic effect in a couple of exploratory three-way encounters instigated by the sexual force field of Bugger Rock. When they finally enter the Bare Dick's lair, it seems anticlimactic.