Toxic Taste

Because I am not a teenaged boy, I am not the audience for whom ''Tomcats'' is intended. I know this. But even teenaged boys in the ticket buying crowd with whom I watched this rancid grossout teen comedy last weekend were depressed by the mean spirited idiocy of the offering.

As you probably know from the hard sell marketing campaign leading up to its dismal opening, ''Tomcats'' is about a group of guys terrified and revolted by the thought of women in general and marriage in particular. So they ante up money and make a bet: The man who outlasts his buddies as a bachelor takes all. (Or as the poster tagline puts it with the delicacy of a whoopee cushion, ''The last man standing gets the kitty.'' Pussy. Kitty. Pussy. Kitty. Meowww.)

The movie, then, is an advance on the now boring grossout teen movies so popular these days, the comedies obsessed with body fluids and hooters. ''Tomcats'' currently sets a new low for ugliness: It's hateful to everyone in its sight. One woman is anally raped; another is mowed over with a golf cart.

Men are depicted as either sheep (dominated by their wives and girlfriends) or pigs. And piggish of them all is the grunting swine played by Jake Busey, a cheating, rutting jerk who is punished with testicular cancer. The surgeon who saves his life is punished -- presumably for being an adult -- by unknowingly eating the diseased testicle. The scene is a show stopper, or maybe just a lunch heaver.

I assume that the proud people who made ''Tomcats'' -- the stinkbomb with which producer Joe Roth has simultaneously announced his new Revolution Studios and cleared the room -- had it in mind to parody the cancer special Tom Green did last year on MTV with this ''bouncing ball'' sequence. (The movie, which was distributed by Sony, also includes parodies of ''American Beauty'' and ''Mission: Impossible 2'' tossed in like old gym socks.)

But hiding behind a shield of parody, of ''pushing the envelope,'' of ''out- Farrellying the Farrelly brothers,'' is no excuse for bad taste that's in bad taste. Following the sour antics in February's ''Saving Silverman'' and preceding Green's own ''Freddy Got Fingered,'' which arrives April 20, ''Tomcats'' is only the worst of a lot of really lousy teen comedies in which, having thrown off the shackles of political correctness, Hollywood inmates celebrate by shackling themselves just as joylessly to political INcorrectness.

The yoke of exhibitionist inappropriateness is no lighter than that of humorless self regard and propriety, but it's far uglier. Comedies about the goofy, insecure, fearful, or even angry aspects of sex and relationships needn't heap humiliation to make their points. In fact, as the young, dispirited ticket buyers at the movies with me last Saturday demonstrated -- those poor kids looking bummed out and ripped off as they left the theater -- crap can only be passed off as chocolate pudding for so long before there are no more takers for second helpings. If Joe Roth and Revolution Studios really want to rise up and revolt, they'll dump this toxic recipe and try something new.

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