Bachelor Party is definitely the raciest film Tom Hanks has ever been in, but this R-rated comedy classic is tough to find nowadays.
There’s scene in 1984’s Bachelor Party perfectly sums up just how stupid – and hilarious – the movie is. It involves a donkey overdosing on cocaine. Not because anyone gave the donkey cocaine, mind you. No, it’s the donkey’s choice, as he strolls over to a table full of drugs, chops up some lines with his hoof, and goes to town. He then dies of a massive heart attack. A cautionary tale, to be sure. If you haven’t seen Bachelor Party and that joke strikes you as in particularly bad taste, you probably don’t need to track this movie down because it doesn’t get any classier.
However, for a generation of us, Bachelor Party was a late night sleepover classic. It was like The Hangover of the 1980s, albeit not as big of a hit. It’s the raciest movie Tom Hanks ever made, with him playing a young man about to be married (to the late Tawny Kitaen shortly before she became immortalized by Whitesnake), whose idiot friends throw him the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties.
Bachelor Party came out just after Splash made Hanks a star, and given the family following he picked up for that movie, he opted to go a classier route in the future than Bachelor Party might have hinted at. Basically, rather than be the next Robert Carradine (star of Revenge of the Nerds) he became the beloved icon we know now.
As such, Bachelor Party has become somewhat obscure in his filmography, but it’s worth noting that the film made money ($38 million in 1984) and was a staple on VHS and cable. It actually became popular again during the DVD era, with it even getting a DTV sequel no one watched, and almost ended up getting remade. Yet, in recent years, it’s become a frustratingly hard movie to find…unless you live in Canada. In the States, it doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, but in Canada, ironically enough, given the movie’s content, it’s actually streaming on Disney Plus. Yep – a movie where a donkey overdoses on cocaine is streaming on Disney Plus (thank God!).
Like Ransom and Dutch, it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific agenda keeping Bachelor Party out of circulation. You can find plenty of DVD copies on Amazon even if they are out of print, as tons of them were manufactured during its second wave of popularity in the 2000s. Yet, it’s the kind of movie that’s begging for a special edition from a label like Arrow because it would be hilarious to reunite some of the movie’s stars, like Hanks and Michael Dudikoff (the American Ninja), who made his debut in this. It points to a problem, as like Dutch and Ransom, the rights are held by Disney (it was made by 20th Century Fox), who have bigger fish to fry. I get them not wanting to reissue a movie like Bachelor Party, but it would be nice if they were more aggressive in licensing their movies to indie labels, as I have to think a movie like Bachelor Party (or Johnny Dangerously) would sell well.
What do you think? Should Disney open the floodgates and release some MIA classics? Let us know in the comments!