Tomcats (2001)
Directed by Gregory Poirier
College buddies chip in and promise that the group's last unmarried man will collect a cash pot. Seven years later, the kitty is worth $500,000 -- money Michael needs to pay a gambling debt. Problem is, the only other single guy is a hopeless womanizer!
13 connections found
View:
13 films that influenced Tomcats
What critics say influenced Tomcats
The homages to popcorn movies "Pretty Woman" and "Mission: Impossible 2" are trite, and O'Connell mimicking Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" is blasphemous.
Of course, the old T&A show has recently morphed with the gross out comedy popularized by the likes of the Farrelly brothers resulting in pictures such as "American Pie" that combine sex and scatological material for the "viewing pleasure" of their target audience of those hormonally charged viewers.
Could that foreign-exchange chick from American Pie actually act her way through a movie with all of her clothes on?
So he schemes to get Kyle married off to the only girl who seems to have made an impression on him, Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, from "American Pie" and "Scary Movie").
From among the steady parade of women Kyle has bedded, Michael tracks down Natalie (American Pie's Shannon Elizabeth), a police officer who Kyle says may have been the one true love of his life.
The tags " sexist " and " misogynistic " might prove too slight for Gregory Poirier�s American Pie wanna-be, which boasts, " The three words a woman wants to hear most are . . .
Knowing that the Tomcat fund is up to almost half a million dollars, he decides to reunite Kyle with an ex-girlfriend named Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, American Pie ), hoping that Kyle will pop the question and lose the prize.
Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Gene Wilder did it in Young Frankenstein, but director Gregory Poirier is not Brooks on his most dull-witted day.
Tomcats is as a light as the edited-for-TV version of Animal House .
If you�re curious about what happened to the guys from Animal House when they finally got out into the real world, Tomcats is a possible look.
Advertisement
It's sort of like "The Wings of the Dove," if Henry James had had the urge to spice up his story with scenes of sushi-spewing, jokes about transvestites, a sidetrip to the sperm bank and a riveting subplot about the search for an amputated testicle.
The homages to popcorn movies "Pretty Woman" and "Mission: Impossible 2" are trite, and O'Connell mimicking Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" is blasphemous.
Michael is played by Jerry O'Connell (1999's "Body Shots"), a bright-faced veteran actor best known for playing the chubby, scaredy-cat Vern in 1986's "Stand by Me." O'Connell runs with the part, and goes all out in embarrassing himself in certain scenes, but he can't overcome the fact that Michael isn't a particularly interesting or amiable individual.
In my day, in the Classic Eighties Teen Movie era, we had Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Revenge Of The Nerds, comedies that managed to be good while also being (at least partially) about sex.
Advertisement
Like Porky's before it, it was a film that wasn't that good but massively successful, damning us to a cycle of knockoffs that by-and-large make the original look like Citizen Kane in comparison.
Sharing certain similarities with 2000's despicable "Whipped," "Tomcats" is a step above that picture, but shares the same downfall: none of the characters are likable people.