Review of BASEketball (1998) by Stuart K — 30 Apr 2014

Directed by David Zucker, who hadn't directed a film since The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991), and had been mostly writing and producing since then. Here, he stepped back behind the camera for this admittedly funny spoof on sports films and all the conventions and cliches those films usually follow.

You could argue this was the last great movie spoof to be made before Scary Movie ruined everything. Friends since childhood, Joe Cooper (Trey Parker) and Doug Remer (Matt Stone) have invented a backyard game, which is a hybrid of baseball and basketball known as BASEketball, which becomes a local phenomenon.

Billionaire Ted Denslow (Ernest Borgnine) makes a deal to Cooper and Remer to make it a national sport, and within 5 years, it's a massive success. But Denslow's rival Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn), has plans to make money, which involves changing the rules of the game, which has always prohibited players being traded, teams moving cities and major sponsorship deals.

Cooper is against this, but Remer is lured by Cain's promise of money. It's a very silly film, and South Park creators Parker and Stone prove to be very funny actors, but they ended up being disillusioned buy the publicity of the film, and have only stuck to their own projects, which is a shame.

Plus, this is Zucker's last great film, before he jumped on the Scary Movie bandwagon. Oh, well...