FINDERS KEEPERS

John Wood has a bad habit of losing things. Soon after he lost his job, he then lost his house too and when it was foreclosed, he put all his worldly possessions into a storage unit. When he failed to pay the rent for that, he lost the entire contents which were auctioned off in his home town in North Carolina. They included a barbecue grill in which he had stashed his leg which he had lost, or rather had amputated, after a plane crash in which his father had died.

The new 'owner' of his limb was Shannon Whisnant an unkempt overweight redneck who was initially horrified when he first discovered it, but then wanted to parlay the novelty of his find into a ticket for his long dreamed-off 15 minutes of fame.  What followed however was a lengthy drawn out battle over several years to decide who legally and morally owned the leg.  

Whisnant's comically tragic attempts at becoming a TV star based on his new infamy rancorously backfired on him when he realized that the Reality TV crew were not taking him seriously at all and were in fact treating him like the jerk he really is.  On the other hand this is counterbalanced somewhat by Wood's own rather sad story as he struggles with his battles over his drug and drink addiction. However despite the fact he is often very strung out, Wood has a very natural wit and is probably the only genuinely nice person in this whole sordid scenario. He is certainly a vast improvement on his embittered mother who is a real piece of work and says of her son 'I like him, but I don't think I love him.'

Then as if the whole thing is not bizarre enough, when Wood was eventually awarded custody of his own leg again after the matter is settled on a TV Court Show he takes it to an lesbian amateur taxidermist who offers to stuff it for him for nothing. 

Directed by Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel, this unintentionally hilariously funny documentary must have been tough for them to edit as they revisited the feuding men and their families over several years, during which time they all went through an entire spectrum of the worse mullet hairstyles ever. 

This weirdly eccentric movie surfaced first at Sundance who excel at showcasing such oddities. This one mixes sensationalism and downright bad taste with total insensitivity for any of its participants : which all makes for such compulsory viewing.

★★★★★★★