Movie Report: Bachelor Party (1984)

I picked this film up recently at a garage sale or thrift store as I accumulate films on media because they’re about to disappear–I see that this film is not available on Amazon Prime in my location, perhaps because I’m in the buckle of the Bible belt.

The film comes from the era when Tom Hanks made silly comedies and Hollywood was trying to make Adrian Zmed a star. Hanks plays a guy who’s about to get married to a nice girl from a rich family (played by Tawny Kitaen, this character is sweet and it’s from before Kitaen became a full Vixen around the Whitesnake video era, as I recollect, but I was young then). Hanks is a bit of a slacker, a school bus driver for a Catholic school who is also a metal sculptor, but he doesn’t measure up to her parent’s standards–they prefer Cole, played by Robert Prescott (who would later play Kent in Real Genius, which I watched this spring). When he announces the engagement to his friends, they decide to throw Rick a bachelor party with hookers and booze. Rick promises his fiance that he will behave, but hijinks ensue as the women at the bridal shower go to a strip club and then dress like hookers to crash the bachelor party, but they end up mistaken for real prostitutes.

So the story has a lot of room for raunch, and there’s some nudity. Drug usage is not a big part of it, but they do bring in a donkey for sex at one point–although the relationship isn’t actually consummated.

Strangely enough, though, I found it less offensive than more modern comedies like Ted because the main characters demonstrate some mature care for one another, and Rick makes a promise and stays true to it in its fashion. and Or maybe I’m just partial to 80s movies. Rick doesn’t get the full he-grows-up-and-does-great-things redemption at the end–this isn’t a Michael J. Fox movie–but one wishes him well.

The film also has Michael Dudikoff in it, fairly fresh from his turn in the brief sitcom Star in the House, when he was playing silly, high-pitched comic characters before American Ninja turned him into a B-movie action star.

Overall, amusing in spots and certainly a cultural artifact of a more innocent time, where even the raunch was more innocent.

 

But, did someone say “Tawny Kitaen”?

Tawny Kitaen was born in 1961, and she just passed away at the age of 59. As a boy of the 1980s, I remember her vividly even though I really didn’t watch

Of course, she’s perhaps best known as the woman in the Whitesnake videos. Perhaps the better known was “Here I Go Again”, where she rolls around on a car:

But I prefer her role in “The Still of the Night”:

She really exemplified an era and hair band videos.