I was 14 years old when "Bachelor Party" was released...therefore I was too young to see it in a theatre as it was rated "R," and of course Mom and Dad weren't going to take me to see such a film. About a year after that it happened to come on HBO one night while my parents were out for the evening, so I excitedly sat down to watch this forbidden fruit. I laughed my ass off for the entire movie, of course, and the experience was heightened by the knowledge that if Mom and Dad came home before the movie was over and caught me watching it, they would've kicked my butt. Fortunately the film ended before they returned, so I got away with my little indiscretion. That's my main "Bachelor Party" memory and why the film remains so special to me all these years later.

Seeing it again after a quarter of a century (! has it been that long?) I was confronted with a blast of nostalgia. "Bachelor Party" is now a true time capsule of the '80s and as soon as it started I was transported back to my junior high days. Hard to believe that Tom Hanks -- yes, THE Tom Hanks -- got his start in goofball comedies like this, "Volunteers" and the sit-com "Bosom Buddies" before becoming an award winning serious actor. Hanks is likable in just about anything, and "Bachelor Party" is no exception. His character, a goofy slacker named Rick who drives a school bus for a living, has somehow lucked into marrying the gorgeous Tawny Kitaen (who would become famous a few years later for her turn in several Whitesnake videos, then infamous after that for her drug and alcohol fueled activities), to the horror of her rich parents. Rick's party-animal friends (including Adrian Zmed of "Grease 2" and "T.J. Hooker" fame) want to send Rick off into married life with the bachelor bash to end all bashes, and so the characters descend on an upscale hotel suite with all the class of a horde of Vikings on the attack. The party has all the sleazy trimmings you'd expect (drugs, hookers, booze, porn, strippers, etc.) plus a few hilarious asides such as a pimp who "looks like Gandhi" and a well endowed male stripper who goes by the stage name "Nick the Dick." Rick's fiancé, afraid that he will be unfaithful to him during said party, decides to crash the proceedings with her friends, leading to predictable '80s raunch-comedy chaos. (A naked guy hung out of the hotel window! A Marilyn Monroe lookalike stripper who turns out to be a guy in drag! A cocaine-snorting donkey that dies of an OD!) I laughed just as hard as I did when I was a teenybopper! This movie still holds up as one of the best low brow comedies of the 80s, if not of all time. Rent this one and give your inner 14 year old the time of his life!

"Bachelor Party" is very much like other films of its genre except that it is one of Tom Hanks' very early efforts and, as a result, is more fondly remembered than it probably would be without Hanks.

Yes, before Hanks turned into Forrest Gump and an Oscar-winning heavyweight actor, he desperately starred in a 1984 teen sex comedy not unlike "Porky's," "The Last American Virgin" or "American Pie." "Splash" had been a success by now so the marketers could rely upon his newly-created status to promote "Bachelor Party," and it paid off -- this movie was an unexpected hit when it came out (albeit a small one).

Tom Hanks is a fine actor but I have to say that he had a certain charm about his acting that made many mediocre '80s comedies -- including "Turner and Hooch," "The 'burbs" and of course "Bachelor Party" -- immensely likable despite their flaws.

Yes, this is a crude, lewd, rude movie but it has its fair share of embarrassing moments, laugh-out-loud segments and cheesy (but fun) segments. Good entertainment for a Friday or Saturday night, and a good glimpse at a much younger, thinner, more comedic (and slapstick) Tom Hanks before he got all weepy-eyed and serious on us.