Bachelor Party: Review of an Event Defining Movie

Greetings and salutations confections!

Bachelor parties are a beautiful thing. A true male bonding experience that results in close friendships getting closer and…wait, no they’re not. A bachelor party is a brutish experience that typically features more alcohol consumption than the wedding itself and which every man at the party is at least partially embarrassed to have taken part in the stupidity and childishness. They are unfortunately NEVER of the caliber established in the film Bachelor Party (I think I would actually contemplate murder to have had a bachelor party as awesome as the one in that movie), and nobody is there to enhance any relationship they have with anyone except their toilet. Moreover, the after-effects of a bachelor party are usually enough to make anybody regret the night before (after my last bachelor party, my face hurt terribly and I found out that I asked all my friends to punch me in the head…). In this spirit of horrible decisions and “what in the hell did I do?” moments that the makers of The Hangover came together to make their movie.

Despite what I just led you to believe, I’m not going to review The Hangover…yet. This is a review for the 1984 hit film, Bachelor Party (hey, if it’s not a hit, then why did it make back more than six times its budget? Just because you might never have heard of it…).  It’s not the first of its kind (that honor goes more easily to Animal House, depending on how loosely you define film genres), but it’s a very funny movie, and I couldn’t resist setting up that paragraph for The Hangover and instead reviewing this (though my review for The Hangover will likely be up in a couple days).

Rick Gassko (Tom Hanks you know, that guy from The Green Mile who's the voice of Woody in Toy Story) is a school bus driver for St. Gabriel’s, a catholic school run by nuns. Every day when Rick picks up his kids from school he waits until they are out of eyesight of the school, and announces that the kids can do whatever they want. The nun would undoubtedly not enjoy what happens here (though she seems good humored as she takes Rick's joking around quite well); the children begin running around like wild, looking at adult magazines, and gambling (Rick gets ten percent of the house’s take). It's quite the scene, and later in the movie, the boys will appear in Rick's mind and encourage him to partake in debaucherous deeds.

He heads off to pick up his friend O’Nei (Adrian Zmed of The Final Terror, who actually sang on the soundtrack for this film!), a photographer at one of those in-department-store deals who is currently having more fun taking pictures of a single mom’s…shall we say, assets, than he is her son. The two goof around for a bit before heading out to pick up their friend Rudy (Barry Diamond of House Party and National Lampoon's Movie Madness). Rudy’s a mechanic and he seems just a little bit off, but he’s a good friend of Rick, so we’ll let him come along with us for the ride. Oh, by the way, Rick drives his school bus everywhere as though it were his car, awesome; you know, despite the fact that it's actually impossible since those buses stay at depots during after-hours times. I wish I could have cheese-bus for a car though...

The three pals head out to pick up two more friends of theirs, Gary (Gary Grossman of Brain Donors and Leprechaun 4), a ticket broker…now there’s a profession that’s relevant to today’s world (sarcasm included), and Ryko (Micahel Dudikoff of TRON and The Shooter), a waiter at a local restaurant who can’t even pronounce the word parmesan. Along with Stan, Rick’s brother the doctor and Brad (Universal Soldier's Bradford Bancroft), their grade-school friend, two MORE friends that we will meet later, these guys make up our main cast of crazies for the upcoming party.

First though, Rick has to tell everyone he’s getting married. Evidently, in the 80s, you didn’t tell your friends you were getting married until about a week and a half before the wedding. Rick’s friends don’t want him to go through with it but eventually they realize they can have a bachelor party so they are much more receptive to the idea.

Rick’s fiancé, by the way, is an 80s-hot (totally different from present-day hot) number named Debbie. Debbie’s parents don’t think too fondly of Rick, especially her dad and he tells Rick as much over lunch the day before the bachelor party. To make matters worse for the happy couple, Debbie’s former boyfriend Cole (Robert Prescott from Burn After Reading) is determined to break up the marriage before it can happen (he offers to buy Debbie for 10-grand and a host of appliances). Rick actually likes Debbie though, so Cole will have to do better than that (later, he’ll offer Rick his Porsche, but that won’t be enough either).

The night of the bachelor party finally arrives, and we are in for the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties. We’ve got smut, strippers, hookers, drugs, a band, dozens of random guests, a suicidal man who only has an electric razor, nerds falling in love with transvestites, and for some odd reason, the mascot of the local elks lodge (who are having their meeting in the same hotel as the party) looks far too much like an actual animal…On top of that, we’ve got a back and forth war of the bachelor party with Debbie and her friends who are giving her a shower. First, the women edit the men’s stag reels to take out all the dirty parts, and then Cole (in order to try to break up the wedding) sends a pair of strippers over to the women’s party. In return, the women go to a Chippendale’s for some fun of their own. In response to this, the men play a prank so outrageous on the women, that not only does it need to be seen to be believed, but it drives the women to dress up as hookers to try to sneak their way into the bachelor party and catch all the guys misbehaving. It’s an especially important situation for Debbie, as Rick had promised her he wouldn’t sleep with anybody else at the party, and if she catches him, the wedding is off. Oh, and with the party beginning to rage out of control, is it only a matter of time before the police show up?

Let’s also not forget that Cole is out there trying to break up the party and the wedding. He will go to any lengths to get the wedding called off, so it’s only marginally surprising when he ends up wearing combat fatigues and brandishing a crossbow. Cole’s schemes go so far that he ends up attempting to kidnap Debbie in an attempt to keep her to himself and stealing away to a 3-D movie theater.

The movie might not be perfect (there are a decent chunk of gags that are outdated today) and it did not reinvent the comedy or even the crude comedy film as we know it. It did redefine bachelor party expectations, though. Every time a bachelor party has been planned since this movie hit theaters over 25 years ago, at least one person has made a comment about getting a donkey that will overdose. That alone is worth the price of admission.

The best thing (I think) about bachelor party is that it’s Tom Hanks back when Tom Hanks was goofy and young. Remember those days? Before Philadelphia and most importantly Forrest Gump (talk about a film that redefines a guy’s career), there was The ‘Burbs, The Money Pit, and Volunteers and before all of them, there was Bachelor Party. Of course, Hanks had just had his breakthrough role in Splash the year before but was still a relative unknown willing to do anything to be in a movie. Lucky for us. This movie is one that I could not envision without Hanks, despite the fact that Jim Carrey, Tim Robbins and Howie Mandel were considered for the part. Just thank your lucky stars that the original Rick Gassko, Paul Reiser, got fired after only two days of shooting…this movie would be trash with him in Hanks’ role.

Come and get a piping hot helping of lessons learned for the day. We’ve learned that stereotypes can be transcended and a pimp can look like Gandhi. We’ve learned that occasionally, a restaurant hires a guy who can’t pronounce the word “parmesan.” We’ve also learned that the jokes about Gary being a ticket broker make no sense to anybody born after the year 1984. Further, we have learned that 3-D in the 80s was MUCH more realistic than today; evidently, it was not at all uncommon to actually FEEL like you had been punched in the face by a 3-D hand! Women unfortunately cannot be bought with appliances (so that trade my friend and I were working out for my wife is not going to hold up). Finally we’ve learned that a view of the full moon is not always a good thing, and donkeys can handle a surprisingly large amount of blow before it finally becomes too much. Oh we’ve also learned that pain is SUCH a rush!

It’s stupid, it’s juvenile, it’s raunchy, and worst of all, it’s totally dated, but there hasn’t been an on-screen bachelor party in 25 years that comes close to the epic scenes depicted here and for that alone, it’s a must-see.

Final Rating below…as always you can find out exactly what that rating means and view a full list of all my movie reviews; all you have to do is CLICK HERE.