Upsetting Day: Church Ball

I don’t know if I’ve ever worked harder to watch a terrible movie than I did to locate the Mormon comedy basketball film Church Ball. It’s not streaming anywhere online, so I had to order physical media from Ebay and I then lost the DVD for about three months. My husband found it wedged between the seats of my car for some reason, and when I finally opened it, there was an enormous splotch on the DVD that Google told me sometimes happens if a DVD sits for over a decade without being opened like every copy of Church Ball. I’m convinced someone was trying to prevent me from watching this thing, and I’ve decided that person was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Let me explain.

There are a lot of D-list celebrities and celebrity-adjacent people in Church Ball. Owen and Luke Wilson’s brother Andrew Wilson is the lead; Ron Howard’s brother Clint has a small part, along with Gary Coleman, Fred Willard, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s son, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Jr. Someone involved in this movie tried to make it disappear, and I figure Veronica Mars writer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, is the only one with the power, intelligence, and defensive skills to do it.

Church Ball was produced by Halestorm Entertainment, a Mormon movie production company you may remember from their hit 2002 film, The Singles Ward. After the success(?) of The Singles Ward, Kurt Hale, and his business partner, Dave Hunter (both graduates of Brigham Young University’s film program), decided they were hilarious. They continued to attempt to produce Mormon comedies until their 2004 movie The Home Teachers failed so badly they had to reevaluate their business plan and the ways in which they betrayed their God.

I have no idea why it didn’t take off! According to Wikipedia, it’s “a journey of slapstick comedy and hijinks that includes Greg falling through a ceiling wearing a wedding dress, dressing up like a deer, and accidentally dancing with a dead grandfather at his own funeral.” They did interspecies corpse dancing, and the movie still flopped? Insane. Preposterous. It looks fantastic.

Halestorm decided their movies must simply be too Mormon! They just needed to Mormon it down a little because the comedy certainly wasn’t the problem. They only needed something more secular than donning the flesh of deer and molesting the dead. Something less… churchy. So they produced Church Ball to make a soft transition into more mainstream comedy. They did fewer Mormon in-jokes like this “Grandfather is dead, and yet I’m dancing with him,” and more jokes with a secular appeal like, “This man is fat, haha, watch him eat a donut.” Fucking classic.

There are problems with Church Ball at every level. Bad lighting, bad sound, bad ADR to cover bad sound… and a lot of scenes kind of just end like they got kicked out of whatever place they were filming. They added narration to try and explain the plot but couldn’t afford to get any of the main actors to come back and record it, so the movie is narrated by Andrew Wilson’s wife, even though she’s barely in the film outside of her voiceover. Gary Coleman once said on The Opie and Anthony Show that the production process was like “giving monkeys cameras and lights.” And this is Gary Coleman. He once starred in a video where he played a security guard on the hood of a shopper’s car.

So, what is the plot of Church Ball? You know how in most sports movies, there’s a recruitment montage? What if that were the entire movie? That’s Church Ball. The Mud Lake Church basketball team is bad. The movie shows us this by having their first game break into a riot where the two competing teams beat the crap out of each other. A man dressed as an old woman gets pegged in the head with a basketball. Andrew Wilson’s wife explains via voiceover that this is how Mormons play church basketball. As transcribed by Joseph Smith, “Upon tip off thine furious rage shall smite Mine enemies, from their center down to the pointed guard. 2 Basketball 14:2“

Fred Willard portrays the bishop of Mud Lake church, who is under a lifetime ban from playing church ball because he basketballed so violently he somehow lost an eye, and that’s his fault. He tells Andrew Wilson this will be the last season of church ball since the church has decided it’s too violent, which is fair. The way they are playing basketball is way too violent, but they’re also doing it wrong. If I said let’s go play some tennis and then I pulled out a gun, that doesn’t mean tennis is too violent. It means I’m the best.

Fred wants Andrew to lead them to victory because the team has never won, and this is their last chance. The rest of the movie is about Andrew successfully recruiting three players to the team: a man with a heart condition that will kill him if he plays basketball, Gary Coleman, and a guy who looks like a dollar store Hulk Hogan but is supposedly an amazing basketball player (we see him make one free throw). There’s no learning to work together or really much basketball played at all. When the playing starts, it’s a mess and looks very hard. Their casting process was clearly two questions: are you related to someone famous, and have you never seen a basketball in your entire life? You’re hired!

You might be thinking, wait, isn’t Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s son in this movie, Lydia? Didn’t you basically accuse him of coming to your house and slapping this DVD out of your hands to maintain his son’s dignity? Yes, I did, and that definitely happened, but his son is not on the basketball team. They got Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s son to be in this movie, and he’s one of the only characters that does not play basketball!

There are so many moments in this movie that are frustratingly close to being funny. When Andrew Wilson sees that Kareem Abdul Jabbar Jr. has just moved into the neighborhood, he excitedly goes to recruit him to the church basketball team—Gary Coleman play’s Kareem’s Dad, who joins the team instead of him. If executed well, that could have been a great bit, but they somehow can’t figure out where the joke is in Gary Coleman fathering this giant. They never explain why Kareem Abdul Jabbar Jr. doesn’t join the team or why Gary Coleman does. They simply show us these two people, then Gary Coleman is on the team later. Are Mormons too polite to clear up misunderstandings or… oh no, c-could they have maybe mistook them for the same person? No.

Huge chunks of this movie are very clearly missing due to general incompetence. Then there are scenes that drag on forever because Fred Willard’s improvising is funnier than anything in the script and the director left it all in. The closest I came to laughing in this movie is during a five-minute-long scene where Fred Willard pretends to call people on the phone, and it’s fine. Frankly, this movie doesn’t deserve it.

Dr. Thunder Owen Wilson is also shockingly good in Church Ball. He plays it as though he’s in a Wes Anderson movie, totally straight and monotone, while everyone around him is doing these big dumb kindergarten jokes. There’s a scene where he’s eating a Mexican dinner with his family and his teenage son is being an asshole, so he says, “Billy, drink your salsa,” to shut him up, and he delivers it so dryly I genuinely loved it. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be a joke or if Mormons are so unfamiliar with salsa they think you drink it? I’m too afraid to Google it.

Anyway, they have a brief training montage, and then they win their big game. That’s Church Ball, the movie. Not really a movie, though; more of a bizarre series of mistakes wearing a movie disguise to walk among them. But what’s this? Church Ball: The Game, based on Church Ball, the movie? Oh, did you think there wasn’t going to be any Merch? Halestorm was so confident this would be a cross-religious hit that they commissioned a card game for people who like games and basketball but not playing basketball. Nerds, I mean. This game is for nerds.

I feel like this was Clint Howard’s one chance to be on a board game, and he took it, and that’s great for him. Not many people can say they’ve been in both an Oscar-nominated movie and a card game box for a film promoting Mormonism and basketball while failing at both.

The instructions say that Church Ball: The Game “uses cards and dice to simulate a basketball game. Use your imagination; add your own play-by-play and some trash talk, and you’ll think you’re playing a real game of basketball!” So cool! Of course…you could just go play a real game of basketball? Nah, what am I saying? That’s crazy. This looks like way more fun:

So, basically, rolling the dice is like shooting the ball. Even numbers miss, odd numbers score two points, and doubles score three points. The cards allow you to block shots and make free throws. You may notice that the cards have generic clip art basketball men on them rather than the (siblings of) stars from the film it’s based on. You may also notice this sounds really boring. Can you imagine gifting this to a child? They would kick you right in the shin, and you would deserve it. “Is this a basketball board game starring Clint Howard?” They would say. “Curse the Mormon God who would allow it,” they would renounce.

“Actually, Clint Howard is barely in the movie and not in the game at all. I’m not sure why they put him on this box except that, I guess they’re assuming someone might say I think that guy was in the live-action How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and be driven to purchase by that brand recognition,” you might reply.

Anyway, I don’t understand why Kareem Abdul Jabbar definitely went to so much trouble to hide this movie from me. Halestorm officially shut down in 2020, and they stopped making movies in 2013. You’ll be shocked to hear that Mormonism wasn’t the problem with their comedy and was, in fact, probably the only thing selling their movies. They followed it up with The Singles 2nd Ward (really) in a desperate attempt to return to their roots, and it spectacularly didn’t work. I’m sure someday soon we can hope for a Church Ball resurgence; they just haven’t found its medium yet. Maybe a podcast?

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