60 - The Silence Of The Hams

Connection To POSSE - Billy Zane

The common misconception is that when Friedberg and Seltzer started getting their hands on the spoof genre is when it went to shit, I've even heard the statement "spoofs aren't as good as they used to" but the truth is even before they got there grubby mitts on the sub-genre, there was plenty of spoof that was less then classic - Plump Fiction, Mafia, Repossessed - are among those, the truth is actually for every Airplane or a Naked Gun there was films just fleetingly funny or downright poor.

The Silence Of The Hams, which to me is such a groan-worthy name for the film, seems tone of the most forgotten of the mid-90s spoofs and is something I did see on TV back in the day, truth is all I remembered though was Billy Zane and his name being a play on Jodie Foster and Dom DeLuise as the Hannibal Lector character, and though it's listed as 1994 on the internet I could of swore it came out in the UK in 1996, which I just checked on, so good memory there.

There's scenes that spoof the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct and the cell scene in The Silence Of The Lambs, anybody who has seen Loaded Weapon, which predated it by a year will know these scenes have already been spoofed. The two films it really spoofs most is of course Lambs and Psycho and besides them there is spoofs of Bram Stoker's Dracula and (rather on the nose) The Addams Family.

I found myself smiling at a far few parts of this movie, mostly with my eyes rolling at the same time. The film is bad, but it was so enjoyably bad, I was right about the Billy Zane character - he is called Joe Dee Fostar, I'd totally forgot about Ezzio Greggio being one of the stars (he also directs and writes), I think he's the weakest part of the cast, struggling a bit with English, but there is an awesome cast here including Martin Balsam apeing his Psycho role (this was a very late in his career role), and small roles for Shelley Winters and Mel Brooks among others. Tony Cox who would appear in some of those Selzter Friedberg spoofs a bit later also a very small role. For me though John Astin (this is like the fourth film I have watched with him in) and particularly DeLuise have the funniest moments for me.

Overall, groan worthy very often but oddly entertaining, it made me smile and was on the verge of making me laugh out loud, so to me it was actually better then I remembered.