Normally I don’t actually review a film until like the next day, or sometimes I might forget and won’t review it until a week or so later unless I have some Decode Magazine deadline to meet. The reason is I have good recall. Not Total Recall but really really good recall. The Good Lord didn’t bless me with looks, athletic ability, intelligence, a decent metabolism, a prodigious member and a laundry list of other things that He in His great wisdom felt I didn’t need, but He did give three things; height, a pair of ears that lay flat against my head and a great memory. Sometimes though that memory can work against you, such as seeing actress Loretta Devine getting banged while bent over a copy machine in this awful, awful film ‘Cougar Club’. That image has seared itself in my brain and will not leave. I am forced to try to write a review of this film IMMEDIATELY after shutting off my DVD player in an effort to purge that vision from my brain. If it was anybody else, I don’t think my brain would have hurt so bad, but I just saw Ms. Devine a week ago playing the kindly matriarch of an adult brood in ‘This Christmas’ and then days later to see her bent over a copy machine while getting waylaid by some childish spiky haired white dude? Was there no other older African American actress they could find for this role? Pam Grier? Bernadette Stanis, who I haven’t seen in anything in a while? Kim Fields? Jennifer Lewis? One of the ladies who play the mothers on that sitcom ‘Half and Half’? Cicely Tyson? Anybody but Loretta Devine.

Spence (Jason Jurman) and his best friend Hogan (Warren Kole) have just graduated college. Spence hopes to get into Yale law school on the supreme urgings of his father, while Warren simply wants to bed as many older women as possible. At Spence’s graduation party his dad has managed to get him and internship at a prestigious law firm, because Spence is far too stupid get into Yale on his own merits, but it all falls

apart when the president of firm catches his wife Edith (Faye Dunaway) going cowgirl on Hogan at the party. THAT, for some reason, I could deal with. With that opportunity dashed, Spence’s dad finagles his son and his BFF into a smarmy divorce law firm run by the smarmy Mr. Stack (Joe Mantegna). Stack treats poor Spence like crap, giving him the name ‘shit turd’ and making him and Hogan do awful things like clean out jelly between the other partners toes.

Through a series of circumstances the wild and crazy Hogan convinces the mild and meek Spence to form a club where they charge a membership fee of 500 bucks to young men and bless them with access to a plethora of ‘cougars’, a term that is completely new to me. You learn something new every day. With loads of horny young men and a gaggle of even hornier older ‘cougars’, the club is a smash success. Unfortunately for our heroes, when the partners at the law firm discover that their wives are members of the club, sorrow and sadness will ensue. Now our the two best buds must find a way to stay out of jail, renew their friendship, get Spence into Yale while continuing to provide the world with their much needed service.

I believe we’ve all heard the mantra that comedy is timing. Now we could lay the blame for the failure of 'Cougar Club' on one Sam Seig who is listed as the editor of this film, because maybe he doesn’t know how to splice and dice well enough to accentuate the intended humor in this film. But if we were to ask Sam Seig why this film is cut so poorly, he may say he can only cut what he was given and transfer blame right back to Christopher Duddy who directed and help write this compendium of unfunniness. Sam Sieg might have said 'I would have loved to have cut away from a particularly unfunny bit as opposed to lingering on the characters staring blankly off into space long after the failed joke was over, but they didn’t give me anything to cut to, so DON’T BLAME ME!' There was a lot of this lifeless humorless dead space in ‘Cougar Club’ that had you wondering if Netflix had sent me an unfinished work print as opposed to a completed film. Another place where this film is screwed up is that it is allegedly the ‘Unrated’ version, but I found this thing fairly tame as well as lame as they managed to squeeze only a couple of gratuitous boobs in a film that is supposedly a farciful comedy about sex.

Jason Jurman and Warren Kole as the two leads seem quite perfunctory in their roles and I wouldn’t place too much of the blame on them for this awfulness, and producers did manage to rope some decent name actors for supporting roles, like say Loretta Devine, but it didn’t help my pain. Unfortunately there’s not a lot to recommend here, and so far the vision of Warren Kole pumping Loretta Devine over a copy machine is still burning in my skull and getting out of my warm bed and forcing myself to write this review has not helped to relieve this situation. Damn.