Then again, these groomsmen, along with everyone in their town, went above and beyond the call of duty when they threw the ultimate bachelor party—an all-day LARP re-enactment of Rambo.
Items on endless Rambo checklist:
- Everyone gets lighters
- Make red headband
- Call the bride.
Dana Saint is co-founder of Gnarly Bay, a film production company in Westerly, R.I. with a history of producing elaborate bachelor parties. By "elaborate" we mean all-day events involving things like ziplines, paintball, and crawling on your stomach through the woods beneath an obstacle course of caution tape.
Saint is also a huge fan of Rambo—specifically First Blood, the classic action film that saw Stallone making his debut as the now-iconic Vietnam vet who becomes the target in a war with a ruthless local sheriff.
So when Saint's wedding rolled around in August, it didn't take a genius for Gnarly Bay's other co-founder, Dan Riordan, to put two and two together and come up with the best bachelor party—a surprise re-enactment of First Blood that saw Saint take over the impromptu starring role.
It did, however, take a lot of snazzy cinemetography and editing to share it with the rest of us, as the company did on Vimeo earlier this week. But as you can see, the results were worth it.
The event involved a great deal of meticulous planning, complete with lots of cooperation from local businesses, weeks of logistics planning in the woods, and a stroke of last-minute inspiration involving building POW cages to allow participants to trigger explosions in real time without having to stop, break character, and ruin the roleplay.
Writing about the big day on the film company's blog, Riordan noted that as they were planning the wedding, the group was also memorializing a close friend who recently passed away. The two mixed events spurred them on to greater heights of spontaneity, including sending Saint on a surprise last-minute trip to Colombia as the day's big finale.
Other plans, like dreams of getting Brian Dennehy to reprise his original role as the evil sheriff, fell through. Instead, when the big day came, the local sheriff stand-in for the proceedings, doing a respectable Dennehy impersonation, kidnaped Saint, who fell readily into his role. Before hauling him into a fake cop car, he blindfolded Saint with the iconic red headband. Then he dragged him to a tanning salon so he could be as brown as Stallone before kicking it into high gear and setting off the day's events.
Gnarly Bay has been producing films for over a decade. Here they are discussing their creative inspirations with an blog that notes, pre-Rambo, their ability to "transport a viewer to places and into stories that may seem out of reach." You don't say.
We know these guys love film, but we think they may have found a higher calling: event planning.