The Problematics: ‘Bachelor Party’ at 40, A Naughty Comedy That’s Also The Most ‘80s Movie Ever

Did you watch the commemoration of D-Day on June 6^th this year? It was the 80^th anniversary. Wait, do you know what D-Day is, even? Things are getting aged, and people are forgetting, or never had any idea in the first place. It’s scary! And it’s a common symptom of our times overall, apparently.

But let’s presume you know D-Day was the Allied invasion of France that helped turn the tide of the Second World War at the cost of many American lives, as commemorated in the movie Saving Private Ryan, which brings me to my point. Conspicuous in their presence, among various heads of state and surviving WWII veterans, were director Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks, two Boomers who’ve done more than their fair share to praise the Greatest Generation. We have long known Hanks as Hollywood royalty; on this occasion, he may have attained a form of sainthood.

While Hanks no longer commands the box office as he once did, his film output is accorded respect by default, and why not. Yet we all started somewhere; the smirky Some Like It Hot-derived sitcom Bosom Buddies is remembered by mavens. One of the most peculiar things about the sole genuine Problematic in Hanks’ theatrical filmography, 1984’s Bachelor Party, is that it came after his star-making turn in the delightful and mostly family-friendly romcom fantasy Splash.  The thing about actually making movies is that you never know what’s going to hit. 

Bachelor Party’s premise is laid out in its title. Hanks, looking like he’s barely out of his teens (he was in his late 20s), plays Rick, an amiable man-child who drives a Catholic school bus and welds modernists sculpture on the side. When he announces to his average-level loutish buddies that he’ll be married in a week, they erupt. “Let’s have a bachelor party! With chicks and guns and fire trucks and hookers, drugs and booze!” cries moderately stereotypical Hispanic pal Raul (Richard Lorenzo Hernandez). “All the things that make life worth living for!” whinges moderately stereotypical Jewish pal Gary (Gary Grossman). Rick’s fiancée, Debbie, will have a shower herself, and she makes Rick promise he won’t sleep with a prostitute at the gala. A seemingly reasonable request, one made even more reasonable by the fact that Debbie is played by Tawny Kitaen, then at the height of her tawniness. Or perhaps of her kitaenness?

(And by the way, I heard a funny story about her in the later ‘80s; shortly after her epochal appearance in the 1987 Whitesnake video for “Here I Go Again,” someone I know was in a doctor’s waiting room with her, and another, nosier patient asked, “Aren’t you engaged to the rock singer David Coverdale?” and she furiously responded “I am NOT engaged to ANYBODY;” she and Coverdale married in ’89, divorced in ’91), 

Tawny, especially at this early point in her career, did not look like someone even a stud like Tom Hanks would ever contemplate catting around on, but that’s movies for you. As it happens, by the end of Bachelor Party we learn he never wanted to do any such thing, so the logic actually holds.

But we have to go through quite a bit to get to that ending. Director Neal Israel, co-scripting with Pat Proft, concocts a very busy scenario that packs in machinations from a scorned ex-boyfriend of Debbie (played by Robert Prescott, who’d go on to work his malevolent WASP persona to more constructive effect in Real Genius, also scripted in part by Israel and Proft, in 1985), objections from Debbie’s father (George Grizzard, largely maintaining his dignity even when trussed up in bondage regalia because of course that’s how he ends up). Israel, a sometimes collaborator with Amy Heckerling on the popular novelty Look Who’s Talking films (it’s the baby! It’s the BABY who’s talking!), got some of his cachet from helping create the Police Academy franchise. His brand of comedy is naughty rather than edgy; sitcom grade with more cussing and body parts, which was a real thing before cable came up with “prestige TV.” 

Hence, Bachelor Party, despite its preponderance of breast jokes (in which Hanks participates with a level of semi-smirky conviction that can only be described as “mid”), loose sex talk, one really poorly executed gag in which Gary falls for a transgender sex worker and is later seen showering and washing his mouth out in disgust, and another gag involving a foot-long penis in a hot dog bun so timidly belabored in its shooting that you never see  thing, not even the bun (not that I wanted to, mind you, but I can take it), never reaches the level of problematic that you get in Revenge of the Nerds from the same year. (For instance, all the sex here, of which there is not a lot, is entirely consensual.)

What it delivers are a lot of moments in which you’ll say, “That joke was funnier in National Lampoon’s Animal House.” For instance, future scream queen Monique Gabrielle shows up and strips down for Rick’s delectation, and he hallucinates a group of Catholic schoolboys and various other figures in his life (some in the form of talking heads grafted on to Gabrielle’s body, which had made its debut in Penthouse magazine a couple of years earlier) advising him as to whether or not he should hit that. Despite the angel/devil bit in Animal House being a lot less elaborate, it’s still funnier (AND more offensive). Then there’s a donkey, who (spoiler alert) dies after a party drug overdose and has to be removed from the premises. Funnier, and more offensive, in Animal House. 

Which speaks to the substantial influence that the comedy wielded even half a decade after its late ‘70s release. And also, perhaps, to something else. Neal Israel, like Animal House director John Landis, came into feature films with a television parody. Landis had Kentucky Fried Movie, largely written by the soon-to-be Airplane! -legendary Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. Israel had Tunnel Vision the year before, ’76; what it lacked in soon-to-be-legendary writers it compensated for with soon-to-be legendary performers, including John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman. Perhaps some rivalry was afoot here.  

In any event, if Israel failed to scale the comedy height that Landis did, what he delivers in this picture is possibly the MOST EIGHTIES MOVIE EVER. The costumes and coifs (some of Hanks’ buddies have literally feathered hair), the overlit by default cinematography, the treatment of cocaine abuse as just a normal party thing, and most of all, the fact that the movie’s theme song, over the end credits, is by “quirky” rockers Oingo Boingo (one of several on the soundtrack, in fact; frontman Danny Elfman was still a few years behind becoming a solo scoring king). Makes this old man wonder how he survived. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.