Le silence des jambons

An unbelievably lame attempt at a parody flick,with all the obligatory sight gags,except here they are completely lame-brained and usually have nothing much to do with anything,and most of the verbal gags are just plain desperate for laughs,like when a woman enters a room dressed completely in red and the narrator(putting on an extremely irratating french accent)calls her "the woman in blue".Hilarious.The rest of the jokes pretty much follow that form,simply changing key words in things and they are all completely stupid.Also,the usually fantastic Billy Zane is no comedy actor,and looks very uncomfortable here.A thoughrouly boring movie.Parody flicks are among the cleverest comedies ever made and if you want a good one,try Spy Hard,Naked Gun or Airplane but definatly not this!

It is an true art form to make a good parody, an art form that Mel Brooks perfected. And even if Mel Brooks has a brief cameo, it is Ezio Greggio that is the mastermind of this one. And though he don't reach the heights of Brooks, he and the rest of the cast and crew delivers a good parody. The base for the parody is Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, but some other movies get spoofed along the way.

In a movie as this it is the jokes that is the essence of it all. One can't really talk of a coherent plot nor is the cast performance the major part. Note however that the performance is not bad, but it is more fun to try to recognize each actor/actress instead, as it is used in some jokes. Now, the joke part, I think that the major part of the jokes and spoofs was very funny. Some didn't work, and some too predictable to produce much laughter. However, all in all, the jokes were good and well worth the time spent watching the movie.

7/10

Ezio Greggio is trying hard to make us laugh. The film is full of gags but you can not have fun at all of them, many are downright infantile. I smiled at the scene with that huge coffin, that's all. Massive inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs", the film is lost somewhere in the "purgatory" of these two masterpieces. The result is a mediocre parody. Not even the presence of Martin Balsam, the original detective in "Psycho" doesn't save the film. Not even the beauty of Joanna Pacula. Neither the sexy forms of the little Charlene Tilton. Not even Mel Brooks in his short scene. Not even those 3 cameos of John Landis, Joe Dante and John Carpenter. Ezio Greggio is OK, he has a lot of imagination but, it's not funny. Dom DeLuise(very funny comic actor in other movies) and Billy Zane are both commonplace. You will need someone to tickle you in your sensitive areas, or to tickle yourself, to succeed to laugh...

Damn. I find THIS funny? I must admit I'm really disappointed in myself, but oh well. "Silence Of The Hams" never even comes close to being well-written or well-directed, and like many spoofs it has a fair share of total groaners. I mean, we're talking about the kind of movie here that names a Hannibal Lecter spoof Dr.Animal Cannibal Pizza. I can barely comprehend how devastatingly witless that joke truly is. And then later a Norman Bates copy shows up and his name turns out to be, God help us all, Antonio Motel. And instead of Sharon Stone, there's...Sharon Bone. These makers really do not like overtime. Somehow though, the movie still has a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, probably because writer/director/star Ezio Greggio got a lot of inspiration from "Naked Gun". The entire script feels like Frank Drebin could walk in any second, the dialogues are crammed with all kinds of stupid misunderstandings. I also very much liked Antonio's narration, which usually provides the biggest laughs of them all. If you turn of your brain completely, this movie is great. If you don't: courage.

I can't think of another movie in which an actor replayed his most famous role...for laughs. Millions of people over several decades saw Martin Balsam as the Detective who Gets Killed on the Stairs in "Psycho" (1960). And here he was, 34 years later, playing his every scene from the original as a gag.

Unlike "Psycho" shower murder victim Janet Leigh, Balsam always refused to give interviews on his scenes in "Psycho," feeling it was given too much notice over his other films (he won the 1965 Oscar for "A Thousand Clowns.") I guess he was finally willing to revisit the detective -- for pay. Maybe it was revenge for Balsam to play the role in so bad a movie this time.

Yeah, "Silence of the Hams" is terrible, but as a film artifact, I find Balsam's appearance amazing. His physical appearance, too. He's a fair sight more elderly and frail in "Silence of the Hams" than he was in "Psycho," but he takes his staircase fall ("Again??!!") yet again with grace and humor. Intriguing: this was made by its star, Italian comedian Ezio Greggio, and Martin Balsam died in Italy about a year later. Balsam had appeared in many other Italian-made films. Was this film made in Italy?