(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 1 February 2026 18:45, UK
While the times have changed, it remains fair to say that many comedy movies that were popular in their day have aged horrendously. The turn of the millennium was rife with sex-fuelled capers, and one of them left Roger Ebert utterly aghast at what he was watching.
The basic premise of hormonal young men seeking to get laid and party hard dates back a lot further than the late 1990s, but the success of American Pie ushered in a new ‘Golden Age’, which may not be the right term, all things considered. All of a sudden, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into an R-rated romp.
Road Trip, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, The Girl Next Door, and many others arrived within a few years as everyone and their sex-crazed brother tried to get in on the act, but few were worse than writer and director Gregory Poirier’s Tomcats, which still managed to recoup its budget twice over from cinemas, because those films could always be relied on to turn a profit.
As was decreed by the law of the genre, the story follows a close-knit group of friends getting caught up in a wild misadventure, with Jerry O’Connell losing a small fortune during a drunken gambling spree in Las Vegas, and the only way he can pay off his debts is by inheriting the ‘bachelor fund’ he and his buddies have pooled, which is awarded to the last one of their number who remains unmarried.
Unfunny, tasteless, and rampantly misogynistic hijinks ensue, and Ebert was appalled. “The men in Tomcats are surrounded by beautiful women, but they hate and fear them,” he wrote. “That alone is enough to sink the film, since no reasonable person in the audience can understand why these guys are so weirdly twisted. But then the film humiliates the women, and we wince when it wants us to laugh.”
Shannon Elizabeth, ironically of American Pie fame, gets the thankless role as the woman dumped by Jake Busey’s character, who’s then positioned as the one that got away, and a bargaining chip to lure him into ditching his ‘no marriage’ pledge, thereby allowing O’Connell to win the $500,000 they’ve inexplicably gathered. Only, in a shocking twist nobody saw coming, he falls for her, too.
In one scene, which the critic undersold as being in “astonishingly bad taste,” a character undergoes surgery to remove one of his testicles, leading to a sequence of a rogue and disembodied bollock bouncing around a hospital for laughs, which obviously culminates in someone eating it. And yet, it gets worse.
In a movie like this, all you have to mention are ‘ping-pong balls’, and you get the gist. “If the details are gross, the movie’s overall tone is even more offensive,” Ebert intoned. “All sex comedies have scenes in which characters are embarrassed, but I can’t remember one in which women are so consistently and venomously humiliated, as if they were some kind of hateful plague.”
Whenever someone says they don’t make ’em like they used to, it’s usually layered with a tinge of wistful regret. In the case of Tomcats, thank fuck they don’t make ’em like this anymore. If you hadn’t guessed by now, it was a zero-star review.
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