Its central idea–a race against time to return a severed penis to its original owner so it can be reattached–is the kind of off-the-wall “what if?” scenario that can easily send a group of close friends into giggling fits. I know that my friends and I have cheerfully wasted many an evening indulging equally, if not more, sophomoric hypothetical scenarios. Movies, however, are not our friends, no matter how clearly lonely we all are and want them to be. Movies are stories. They require quite a bit more than a solid “what if?” And unfortunately, a story is not something that The Package is equipped to provide.  None of that initial promise, however, ever makes it to the screen. Five teenagers, Donnie (Luke Spencer Roberts), Jeremy (Eduardo Franco), Sean (Daniel Doheny), Sarah (Sadie Calvano), and Becky (Geraldine Viswanathan), all decide to take a summer camping trip. The crew sets off into the woods armed with two coolers of beer, plenty of dumb white kids doing stuff while listening to rap montages, and a Jeremy’s butterfly knife.  On night one, when Jeremy heads off to pee, Sean and Donnie make the mistake of sneaking up on him while he’s fiddling with his butterfly knife. In one fell stroke, Jeremy is hilariously bloodily dismembered. The lad is air-vacced back to civilization while the remaining four kids are charged with finding and returning his peepee to the hospital within a 12-hour window to reattach.  The premise itself is solid enough, but can only realistically generate so much story and laughter on its own. Within the construct of a 90-minute film, screenwriters Kevin Burrows and Matt Mider must build unrelated stories and arcs to supplement the de-dickening. It feels like a bait and switch to watch a movie that begins with an outrageous Bobbitting and then immediately settles into a comfortably boring story about teenagers flirting with one another in the woods and relying on their phones.  It also doesn’t help that the lead characters are underwritten. Sean, Sarah, Donnie, and Becky barely have any defining traits or characteristics. Sean is vaguely a Good Guy (TM), while Donnie is vaguely an Incorrigible Rogue (TM) but neither really sticks to any one concept and they’re often interchangeable. As our Becky and Sarah. There’s also a vape-smoking idiot throwing in there somewhere and you guys are not gonna believe this but his name is Chad. The next time someone names a Chad character Chad, they should have their WGA membership revoked.  The Package does have its moments because…how could it not? With the human characters so underwritten, a lot of the comedic pressure falls to the prosthetic “playing” a severed teenage penis. Thankfully, it’s more than up to the challenge. The frontispiece is a disturbingly lovingly crafted prop that at the very least generates real human emotion when onscreen…even if that emotion is disgust.  Aside from the disassociated dong, The Package is incredibly lean on real laughs. Jeremy is the funniest character despite spending the entirety of the movie in a hospital bed. Perhaps that works in his favor as the journey the rest of the characters are going on is so lifeless and inert that we can just appreciate his increasingly funny desperation. It also certainly doesn’t hurt that Mary Holland stars as a nurse and seemingly the only healthcare professional at this entire hospital. She frequently drops by Jeremy’s bedtime just to taunt him and it’s wonderful. By the end, however, no amount of severed schlongs or Mary Hollands can rescue The Package from mediocre movie-dom. That doesn’t mean it’s not without value. The Package’s premise is so inherently amusing that the hearing it will undoubtedly make the appropriately childish among us smile for a moment. Just enjoy that smile and move on. Processing that The Package exists for 15-20 seconds is far more valuable than enduring the reality of it for 90 minutes.