BASEketball - The Evening Glass

In Issue 29 of the The Evening Glass, Luke and Fletcher return to Luke's DVD A to Z for the first time in a year (a year!) to rewatch effervescent cult comedy BASEketball. Produced, directed and ostensibly written by spoof supremo David Zucker, it's equally a vehicle for its stars ascendant Trey Parker and Matt Stone in, amazingly, their third and, amazingly, last live action outing. Twenty-two years old next month, here in the UK its theatrical release was canceled - I remember reading Empire magazine's preemptive review that summer before the trail went dead for more than a year until it crawled out on video following a dismal performance in US cinemas ($7 million, barely scraping the box office top 150). Its reputation was thus born from Sky Moviemax, late night Channel 4, and rental tapes playing in the background of a hundred Sixth Form house parties.

Canonically consistent with the rise of the Farrelly Brothers, whose There's Something About Mary exploded in cinemas that same summer, and the Weitz Brothers' American Pie, which arrived one year later, BASEketball's bad taste antics unfortunately presaged the decline of its genre, as parody was quickly overwhelmed with gross-out - although, in terms of comedic escalation, perhaps what started with farting cowboys in was always going to end with murder-by-cock-through-the-ear. But we reckon it remains the last good work to emerge from the ZAZ stable and a great vehicle for the sillier side of Parker & Stone.