The Billy Zane Parody Movie That Is So Awful You Can’t Watch It Anymore

Billy Zane starred in The Silence of The Hams, and it's so bad you won't likely ever be able to stream it.

By Douglas Helm | Updated

There are plenty of legendary parody movies out there such as The Naked Gun, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, This is Spinal Tap, Mike Myers‘ Austin Powers films, and even the early Scary Movie entries. Billy Zane’s awful Silence of the Lambs parody The Silence of the Hams is not one of these films. Check out the terrible trailer below (since you can’t stream it anywhere):

The Silence of the Hams stars Billy Zane as Detective Jo Dee Fostar (get it?)who is investigating a serial killer case and must enlist the help of convicted murderer Dr. Animal Cannibal Pizza (Dom DeLuise) to solve the case. While attempting to solve the mystery, Fostar’s girlfriend Jane Wine (Charlene Tilton) leaves town with a case of money and hides at the Cemetary Motel, which is actually a cemetery named after its owner Antonio Motel. Detective Fostar must then solve the serial killer case and the case of his missing girlfriend.

If the slight wordplay in that description didn’t make you bust out laughing, you may be hard-pressed to find much more humor in the film itself. Billy Zane is always a great presence, but that doesn’t mean he can salvage a terrible script. Somehow, The Silence of the Hams did manage to get legendary parody creator Mel Brooks (responsible for the aforementioned Blazing Saddles along with Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and more) to make a cameo.

Along with Billy Zane, the cast of The Silence of the Hams includes Dom DeLuise, Joanna Pacuła, Charlene Tilton, Martin Balsam, John Astin, Tony Cox, and Ezio Greggio. Greggio played Antonio Motel and also wrote and directed the film. The Silence of the Hams has an abysmal 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes if you were wondering if anyone enjoyed the film.

Billy Zane in The Silence of the Hams

Still, the morbidly curious may be inclined to check out this Billy Zane bust, if for no other reason than to find out how long they can sit through it before shutting it off. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the film is so bad that you can’t even stream it on Netflix, Hulu, or anywhere else for that matter. The world of streaming gives us access to tons of films and shows that we may have never seen otherwise, but even the streaming services aren’t touching this one.

So, if you want to watch The Silence of the Hams, you’ll either have to find a hard copy of it somewhere or see if you can find some obscure site that has the full version. It’s probably pretty safe to say that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Especially when other great Billy Zane films like Titanic and other great parody films are easily found on streaming instead.

While it’s unlikely that Billy Zane is proud of The Silence of the Hams, it would probably be difficult for him to ever star in a worse film, so that’s at least one plus. In the meantime, he has moved on to much better projects. Zane has two projects coming out in 2023 alone.

The first of which is the film Centurion: The Dancing Stallion, which is set for an April 25 release date. Billy Zane will also star in the Darin Scott-directed film The Oath. It doesn’t have an official release date yet, but it’s expected to come out this year.