1984's Bachelor Party was NOT Tom Hanks' Finest Film. The Same Could Not Be Said for Co-Star Tawny Kitaen
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I’ve only just begun a similar deep dive into the slightly less distinguished filmography of preeminent 1980s video vixen and David Coverdale muse Tawny Kitaen, who burned bright as the shimmering embodiment of Reagan-era sex and glamour before things took a turn.
1984’s Bachelor Party undoubtedly represented a high point in Kitaen’s young career. For a brief, shining moment, the wildly disparate professional paths of troubled sexpot Kitaen and Tom Hanks, arguably the most beloved actor of the last half century, intersected and they starred as the kind of charming, attractive cinematic couple in Bachelor Party you’d happily pay good money to watch have sex.
When Bachelor Party opened on June 29th, 1984 Hanks wasn’t just the over-achieving star of that dumb cross-dressing sitcom: he was a bona fide movie star thanks to his career-making turn as a dude who fucks a mermaid in Splash.
It was already screamingly apparent at that point that Tom Hanks was way too good for raunchy romps like Bachelor Party. Veteran gag-slingers Neil Israel and Pat Proft, who already hit pay dirt at the box office earlier that year with Police Academy, a lighthearted romp about the lovable misfits and underdogs who make up the police force, really lucked out in getting literally the most charming actor alive to headline their dumb comedy.
The sexy, spontaneous and just plain delightful Hanks was already the beloved pop icon we know and love and have festooned with honors and accolades and awards when he made Bachelor Party.
But he was something else as well: perhaps the world’s preeminent Bill Murray type. How unbelievably appealing is Hanks here? He might just be the first and only Bill Murray type in film history to out-do Bill Murray at playing the Bill Murray role.
You know what I mean when I say a Bill Murray type: an inveterate smart-ass with a never-ending string of snappy patter: sarcasm, sly insults, wry one-liners and inside jokes. The Bill Murray type is a natural leader in the eternal war of the slobs against the snobs. He’s a slacker ideal who professes not to believe in anyone or anything but is secretly an idealist perpetually battling corrupt authority, propriety and hypocrisy.
Richard Ernesto "Rick" Gassko, the wise-cracking Catholic school bus-driver Hanks plays in Bachelor Party is unmistakably a Bill Murray type. He’s the fun, rock and roll bus driver, the one who cranks up the tunes on his boombox, lets the kids do whatever they want and probably flagrantly disobeys traffic laws as well.
Rick treats life as one big joke, a lark not worth taking seriously. That, incidentally, is one hundred percent the correct philosophy for playing the lead role in a movie like this. Another cornerstone of the Bill Murray type is that he is forever winking at the audience to let them know that he is in on the joke, and finds whatever shenanigans he’s engaged in at any given time just as ridiculous as you do.
This attitude gives us permission to have fun with objectively stupid and juvenile material and because Bachelor Party affords us the extraordinary privilege of getting to spend one hour and forty six minutes with Hanks at the height of his sexiness and irreverence, there is ample fun to be had, guilty and otherwise.
Like Bill Murray in his youth, Hanks has the quality of simultaneously being the creative force powering the film and an ironic commentator heckling the goofy nonsense from inside.
Early in Bachelor Party there’s a wonderful scene, vaguely redolent of The Graduate, where Ed Thompson (George Grizzard), the snooty, disapproving father of Deborah Julie "Debbie" Thompson (Tawny Kitaen), Rick’s impossibly gorgeous fiancé, really tears into his future son-in-law, telling him that he’s never liked him because he’s an asshole, and immature, and going nowhere personally and professionally, and utterly devoid of ambition or drive.
Everything he says is true. Our protagonist is a raging asshole but Hanks makes him the most lovable degenerate in the history of sex comedies. I walked away from Bachelor Party with a whole new respect for Hanks. He’s not just a multiple Oscar-winning living legend: thanks to his bravura turn in Bachelor Party, he’s also a party movie legend as well, and that, ultimately, is more impressive than winning some dumb Presidential Medal of Freedom or getting some stupid asteroid named after you.
Rick shocks his friends by announcing his imminent marriage to Debbie, possibly the most gorgeous woman in the history of the universe. The idea of someone in their circle experiencing spiritual or moral growth terrifies the bros but they console themselves with the knowledge that before Rick becomes married and boring and leaves them behind forever they can at least enjoy one last night of epic debauchery via a bachelor party overflowing with drugs, booze, sex workers of both the human and equine variety and enough bad decisions and crimes to last a lifetime.
The partiers reunite with Brad (Bradford Bancroft), an old friend they lost touch with who subsequently become a drug-addicted suicidal depressive who is constantly trying to kill himself with drugs and large vehicles over the break-up of his marriage. I’m sorry, I meant to write that he is a hilarious drug-addicted suicidal depressive who is constantly trying to kill himself with drugs and large vehicles in increasingly zany ways.
The Brad subplot feels like the product of one of the writers half-heartedly watching Harold & Maude on television while doing cocaine and deciding it would be funny to incorporate both the cocaine and Harold & Maude into the film. I would say that Brad adds nothing to the film but major buzzkill vibes but without Brad’s cocaine just lying around Max the Magical Sexual Mule, the donkey the bros hire to have sex with a sex worker in front of a cheering crowd would never have hungrily snorted it all up, denying the film the crowd-pleasing wonder of a drug-addled sex donkey corpse that gets up to nearly as much mischief post-overdose as that zany human Bernie.
Bachelor Party accidentally betrays the weird psychosexual melodrama of bachelor party tradition, the way it encourages genuinely amoral, borderline psychotic behavior under the banner of getting crazy and letting it all hang out.
Israel’s solid box office hit and minor cult classic feels more than a little like the provocative early work of Neil LaBute in sequences where Jay O’Neill (Adrien Zmed) unsuccessfully pressures his reluctant best friend Rick to cheat on his fiancé and soulmate with either a sex worker or a woman Rick has always had a crush on mere hours before he is scheduled to stand before God, his friends and family and wife-to-be and proclaim his undying love for Debbie.
Rick resists temptation in myriad forms but the bachelor party nevertheless descends into chaos and anarchy, complete with a new wave group made up largely of Amy Winehouse lookalikes, random revelers adding to the craziness and all manner of drugs, naked women and booze.
Now at this point you’re saying, “Nathan, this is a raunchy sex comedy about a bunch of bros broing it out from 1984. Just how bad is the gay panic?”
Bad. It’s real bad but it also doesn’t take up too much of the movie’s insanely excessive one hour and forty six minute runtime. Gary (Gary Grossman), the bespectacled, diminutive horned-up Poindexter of the crew thinks he’s lucked out when a sexy Marilyn Monroe lookalike whose vibe is “extremely attractive man in a dress” takes him into a bedroom for some good old fashioned fucking.
The geek’s elation turns to horror, however, when he sees the ostensible “girl” of his dreams peeing standing up. That the cross-dresser Gary accidentally with is credited as “She-Tim” (Christopher Morley, who we recently encountered as a transvestite with a super-powered kick in Freebie and Bean) speaks to the film’s predictably crass, callous treatment of sexuality.
A movie called Bachelor Party about a wild bachelor party does not need a villain working overtime to keep our hero from attaining marital bliss but Bachelor Party has one all the same in Cole Witter (Robert Prescott), Debbie’s ex-boyfriend and a Snidely Whiplash-style bad guy who resorts to increasingly preposterous lengths to undermine his romantic rival.
He begins by offering Rick money, a sports car and a variety of household appliances to abandon his soulmate. When that doesn’t work he resorts to sabotage and then loses his goddamn mind and decides to hunt Rick and his friends with a crossbow. A crossbow! This crazy motherfucker wants to hunt the bros for sport.
Cole ends up getting dropped out of a hotel window naked by the bros in a prank that, to be honest, goes a little too far but our blonde, buff bad guy still refuses to give up.
The muscle-bound moron straight up snatches Debbie, caveman-style, and takes her to a multiplex. There, Rick has a fist-fight with Cole that mirrors the 3-D action onscreen so perfectly that the audience thinks it’s part of the show.
It’s a gorgeously written and executed gag that serves as a reminder that Bachelor Party is the product of two veteran gag-men who would separately and collectively help give the world a whole lot of garbage, including The Star Wars Holiday Special but also Real Genius, Police Squad and The Naked Gun.
Bachelor Party is at least fifteen minutes too long but it’s easy to see why it succeeded spectacularly where so many movies like it failed. Bachelor Party literally could not have had a better lead than a twenty-eight year old Tom Hanks and is funny and vibrant and alive and memorable if predictably problematic and lumpy.
Hanks would go on to much bigger and better things. Kitaen, unfortunately, would not, but for a brief moment she and an actor destined for greatness were perfectly paired as unbelievably beautiful young lovers whose bond proves stronger than even the wildest of soirees.
I don’t know if I would call Bachelor Party one of the best sex comedies of all time. It’s no Booksmart, to cite an infinitely better romp I saw recently but it definitely boasts one of the greatest performances in sex comedy history in Hanks.
At the risk of being controversial, having a young Tom Hanks as its star ultimately works in Bachelor Party’s favor.
Buy The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-In Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop, signed, for just 10.75, shipping and handling included OR twenty three dollars for four signed copies AND a free pack of colored pencils, shipping and taxes included
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 12.00 shipping, handling and taxes included, 23 bucks for two books, domestic only at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.