From the studios' point of view though it makes glorious business sense: no big special effects to pay

From the studios' point of view, though, it makes glorious business sense: no big special effects to pay for, no big star salaries, and a spectacular success rate. American Pie cost Universal Studios just $11m (pounds 7m) and is projected to make at least $100m in the US alone.There is much more of the same in the pipeline. A trailer for Mystery Men, a forthcoming spoof superhero film, shows blood-stained cotton wool shooting out of the nostril of Ben Stiller at high speed. Other titles include one called Richard and another called Dick. One Hollywood script agent recently offered round a story about a man who loses his penis. It was turned down by a studio executive who said, "We're already doing a penis movie."The gross-out trend hardly indicates any desire by Hollywood to curb its excesses.

This is just excess of a different kind: the frenetic desire of every studio to have its own replica of the success of Something About Mary. And it is not as though the violence and horror have gone away; most of this summer's releases were completed before the Littleton massacre, and the bloodier items have simply been held back.At their most crassly commercial, both the violent and the gross-out genres ultimately underline the same thing: the paucity of imagination in Hollywood. "It's the triumph of the salesman," said the comedian Harry Shearer. "It's wrong to say our culture is being run by 12-year- old boys ... even 12-year-old boys have broader tastes than the people who pander to them these days."GROSSEST MOMENTS(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT)AMERICAN PIEThe film that takes the cake, so to speak, with jokes about semen, vomit, masturbation, premature ejaculation, and much more.

One character is told that having sex is like putting your manhood in a hot apple pie, so he tests out the comparison in an unorthodox culinary manoeuvre on the kitchen table. What would Delia Smith think?THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARYNotorious for its extended genitals-caught-in-zipper joke, but also for a scene in which Cameron Diaz mistakes a misdirected gob of semen for hair gel and runs it through her hair in innocent preparation for a date.AUSTIN POWERS 2: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED METhe follow-up to Mike Myers' hit James Bond spoof includes a scene in which a copious stool sample is placed next to a coffee pot. The eponymous hero picks the wrong jug, of course, and ends up smiling unawares with a large brown stain across his upper lip.BIG DADDYAdam Sandler repeats the irredeemable knucklehead role he developed in The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy, this time taking a young boy under his wing and teaching him a thing or two about life, like how to urinate against the walls of fancy restaurants.. WHAT IS a Scottish grandmother doing at the heart of a looming constitutional crisis in Hong Kong, why on earth has she taken on 4,393 clients who are not paying her a penny, and how can she possibly hope to defeat the combined forces of the Hong Kong government and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in Peking? These are all reasonable questions, but when they are put to Pam Baker, who is nearly 70, she simply shrugs and smiles. The 4,393 cases represent what is probably a world record for an action challenging a government's interpretation of its own constitution.

By the end of last week, Baker and Company - two lawyers and one assistant operating from a small flat in a remote village - had completed the Herculean task of lodging these applications. In February, and not for the first time, Mrs Baker was supposed to retire from her small law practice, but she was approached to take on the cases of some mainland Chinese immigrants claiming the right of abode in Hong Kong through having one parent born in the former colony.Mrs Baker, who came to Hong Kong 20 years ago, is a veteran hand at cases no one else will touch. "Not a lot of people will do really unpopular cases," she said. "But it's the unpopular cases which really need a lawyer."After more than decade working for the government's legal aid department, she was forced out because of her work on behalf of "boat people" trying to escape deportation back to Vietnam. In private practice she became their leading solicitor, and a champion of battered wives, when their cause was largely regarded as little more than a nuisance.Now Mrs Baker, her Australian co-lawyer Rob Brook, and their assistant Krista Ma, a Chinese Canadian, are taking on a more formidable target. Their battle to allow mainland Chinese living in Hong Kong to bring in their children has brought them up against the local government and the National People's Congress (NPC) in Peking, both of which have interpreted the Basic Law, or mini-constitution of Hong Kong, so as to put severe limits on residence rights - although it appeared to say that anyone with a parent residing in the territory could live here.The NPC, at the instigation of the Hong Kong government, has overruled the Court of Final Appeal.