When the unruly best friends of a soon-to-be-married man decide to throw him a wild and crazy bachelor party, all hell breaks loose. But his wedding plans could be derailed when an embittered rival does everything in his power to sabotage the party and convince the bride-to-be that her fiancé is no good for her. Will the bachelor be able to resist temptation...?

You may be wondering: to which of the movies in this double-disc collection does the above synopsis refer? Well, both of them! Conceived as a remake but titled and marketing as a sequel, 2008’s Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation manages to be both things at the same time, containing many of the same story elements as the 1984 original, but with a different set of characters.

Both films deal with a comically laidback young man (played by Tom Hanks in the first film and by Josh Cooke in the second film) who intends to marry an upper-class girl (played by Tawny Kitaen and Sara Foster respectively). In both cases, the groom-to-be has a bitter rival who attempts to sabotage the union and almost succeeds in doing so, prompting the bride-to-be to gatecrash the bash to confront her fiancé. Both stories end on a moral high note, with true love winning out over sexual temptation.

However, whereas the villain of the first movie (played by Robert Prescott) is a former lover of the bride-to-be, who still carries a torch for her, the nemesis in the second one (played by Warren Christie, who is supposed to be British, but doesn’t sound like it) is the bride-to-be’s brother-in-law, who is primarily motivated to prevent Cooke’s character from challenging his position in the family business. In the first film, the girl’s parents disapprove of her fiancé, but that is not the case in the follow-up. Both films feature unhappily married characters close to the male lead, who think the impending nuptials are a very bad idea, but one is Hanks’s brother (William Tepper), while the other is one of Cooke’s friends (Harland Williams).

Both feature tasteless humour, the highlights of which include a cocaine-snorting mule and a punch-up in a 3-D cinema in the first movie; and an unwanted persistent erection and a sexy young female Nazi in the follow-up. For me, the second film is actually the funnier of the two, partly because the protagonists are more sympathetic and partly because the first film hasn’t aged well, in terms of either fashion or humour.

There’s more nudity in Bachelor Party 2 if you measure it in minutes of screen time (including a fight with exotic dancers and a round of golf with stripping female caddies) but the only full-frontal nudity appears in the 1984 original.

The first disc is light on special features, with only a few minutes of contemporary (and poor quality) promotional material. The second disc is more generously stocked, with an audio commentary, a handful of behind-the-scenes featurettes and over half an hour of deleted scenes and out-takes, some of which are funnier than the finished movie.

Party on!

6

Chris Clarkson