MOVIES : No Silence of the Hams : Parodies are often popular and cheap to make, and it helps--a lot--if audiences are familiar with the genre being spoofed

Look out! There’s Sean Young, wearing a blowsy blond wig, wielding an ice pick.

Over by the stairs, Armand Assante is hanging onto the banister, doing deep knee bends, bellowing, “NO LIGHTS! NO CAMERA! NO OREOS!”

It’s getting a little weird on the set of “Fatal Instinct.”

Eager to get one last shot before day’s end, the director calls for action. Young charges up the stairs, across the landing and into the bathroom, unleashing a ferocious scream as she tries to sink her ice pick into Assante’s skull.

Veins rippling in his neck, Assante holds her off, grappling for the ice pick, pushing it away from his head as he twists Young around in front of him. Just as he’s about to break free, Young grabs a can of shaving cream and sprays it in his face. Blinded, Assante frantically reaches for the nearest weapon, the only weapon that can save him--a blow dryer, which he turns on Young, full blast, sending a hurricane of wind. . . .

Wait a minute? Did we say . . . a blow dryer?

If you’ve had your fill of ice-pick-wielding femme fatales , it’s time for “Fatal Instinct,” the Carl Reiner-directed spoof of sexy thrillers that’s shooting on the Warner Bros. Hollywood lot. Starring Assante, Young, Kate Nelligan and Sherilyn Fenn, it’s just one of nearly a dozen parody films that are due for release or in development this year at various studios.

Thanks to the box-office success of 1991’s “The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear” and “Hot Shots!,” Hollywood has Spoof Fever. New Line Pictures got the jump recently with “National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I,” which was box-office champ in its first weekend, grossing $9.2 million.

Before the summer is over, there’ll be a Robin Hood parody from Mel Brooks, a “Hot Shots!” sequel starring Charlie Sheen and even a gangsta-rap spoof called “CB4.” Several action-adventure and buddy-cop parodies are also poised to go into production later in the year.

“Parody is an artistically corrective form,” says “Fatal Instinct” screenwriter David O’Malley. “It’s a way of cleaning out the cobwebs. When things become too cliched or stereotyped, the way erotic thrillers have, it’s time to tear down the conventions, pop the bubble and make fun of the genre.”

That’s certainly what comic master Carl Reiner’s actors have in mind. They seem to relish the opportunity to spoof the overwrought roles they’ve often had to play straight.

As Sean Young prepares for another screaming banzai sprint toward Assante, her suave co-star winks admiringly at her, saying, “You can really bloodcurdle.”

Young tightens her grip on the ice pick. “Bloodcurdling, coming up.”

Good parodies, say the form’s most polished practitioners, require equal doses of affection and anger.

“I can’t satirize something unless I have a certain amount of affection for what I’m spoofing,” says Mel Brooks, the clown prince of parody, who is currently shooting “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” which stars Cary Elwes as Robin Hood, Richard Lewis as Prince John and Tracey Ullman as a witchcraft consultant named Latrine.

“I’ve always loved ‘Robin Hood.’ It has a great hero, an underdog, a guy fighting a tyrant, which is something I can identify with.”

David Zucker, director of “The Naked Gun” series, who also teamed with his brother Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams to make “Airplane!” and “Top Secret!,” has an abiding affection for films like “Airport” and “Midway,” which served as inspiration for the Zuckers’ “Airplane!”

“I can watch ‘Midway’ any time it comes on TV and always laugh,” he says. “The joke was that they called it ‘Midway’ because that was the point in the picture when the audience left the theater.”

But affection isn’t everything. “You really can’t do satire unless you’re also pissed off--or at least irritated that something is so cliched and half-baked that you think they’re trying to put something over on the public,” Zucker contends.

“We knew we were onto something with ‘Airplane!’ when we realized that so many people were giggling at ‘Airport ‘79’ that they even changed the ad campaign to say: ‘See It for the Thrills. See It for the Laughs.’ ”

But parody only works if the on-screen talent takes its parts seriously. “Funny characters are death for our kind of humor,” Zucker says. “I always have to remind the actors--forget you’re in a comedy. This is a serious movie. As soon as you let an actor chew the scenery, you’ve lost the joke.”

The movies most ripe for parody are the ones that take themselves the most seriously. “Airplane!” to a large degree was inspired by “Zero Hour,” a hackneyed 1957 aviation suspense film. “Hot Shots!” director Jim Abrahams recalls: “The doctor in the film actually says: ‘We have to find somebody who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.’ I mean, how could you improve on that?”

Some genres work better than others, usually in direct proportion to their serious intent and lack of imagination.

“The more cliches the better,” says Neal Israel, director of the upcoming “Surf Ninjas of the South China Seas,” a comedy adventure starring Leslie Nielsen that spoofs American Ninja and Jackie Chan films. “Cop shows have tons of cliched story lines that are easy to satirize. A military courtroom drama would be a great parody vehicle because you always know where it’s going.”

Many parody masters think it’s difficult to spoof action films like the “Lethal Weapon” series because they already make fun of themselves, an opinion shared by many critics, who bombarded “National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I” with negative reviews.

“Disaster movies were great because they were deadly serious,” Abrahams says. “I’m not so sure about ‘Die Hard’ or ‘Lethal Weapon,’ because they never took themselves very seriously--they’re very tongue in cheek.”

After making “Top Secret!”--their only film flop--Abrahams and the Zuckers learned firsthand about the importance of choosing the right source material.

“You have to pick a genre your audience is familiar with,” David Zucker explains. “I don’t think many people were going around in 1984 saying, ‘You know, what we’d really like to see is a parody that’s a combination of old Elvis movies and bad German spy movies made during World War II.’ ”

Parodies must be timely. David Zucker was already shooting “Naked Gun 2 1/2” when he saw his brother Jerry’s romantic drama “Ghost.” Betting that the movie’s pottery-lovemaking scene would be an instant classic, he immediately shot a spoof version for “Naked Gun”--and used it for the film’s trailer.

“It went over so well with the preview audience,” he says, “that we actually went back and expanded the scene.”

Even after “Fatal Instinct” was in production, screenwriter David O’Malley did similar legwork. Worried that he might have missed a key sex-thriller cliche, he rushed out to see Madonna’s widely panned “Body of Evidence”--and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

“As each new scene unfolded, I kept saying: ‘Done it.’ ‘Done it.’ ‘Done it.’ There wasn’t anything we hadn’t already made fun of.”

One of the first commandments of parody holds that if you’re going to lampoon a scene, pick a classic--and give it a fresh twist.

Gene Quintano, writer-director of “National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I,” always loved the scene in “Lethal Weapon 2” in which Mel Gibson barely escapes an all-out firepower SWAT team attack on his trailer.

“But I thought, ‘What if you got the trailer of the wrong guy?’ ” Quintano recalls. “We had Bruce Willis do our spoof version, dressed in his ‘Die Hard’ T-shirt, crawling out from the wreckage, saying, ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’

“And they go, ‘Oh. This isn’t 1014 Pacific Coast Highway?’ ”

Sometimes the parody is inspired by visual cliche. Israel, who has co-written a sex-crazed-woman spoof called “Repulsive Attraction,” is fond of a moment in “Top Gun” that occurs after Tom Cruise’s best friend has died.

“What made that scene perfect for parody is that Cruise is in his boxer shorts,” Israel says. “In fact, everyone in the barracks is in their boxer shorts! You can’t improve on that. It’s a law of comedy--have people in boxer shorts as often as possible!”

Carl Reiner has attended to similar details on “Fatal Instinct.” As Sean Young prepares to grapple with Kate Nelligan in a scene inspired by Glenn Close and Anne Archer’s bathtub struggle in “Fatal Attraction,” Reiner introduces the actress by saying: “Here’s Sean Young--and her cleavage.”

Pointing to a layer of foam-rubber padding concealed under her dress, Young proudly boasts: “My fake cleavage.”

Once Nelligan is back in the tub, Reiner calls for action. The actresses struggle, sending waves of water splashing over the top of the tub. But each time Nelligan is about to drown, she pops back up, first wearing a diving mask, then armed with a snorkel.

The actresses’ satirical targets are never far from mind. After one scene, Young worries that her blond wig had fallen in her face. “Could you see enough of me?” she asks Reiner.

“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “On the big screen, everyone will know who it is.”

Right on the beat, Young retorts: “Yeah. Madonna.”

During the next take, Young gets a little overenthusiastic. Even after Reiner says: “OK, let her up,” Young holds Nelligan under water, saying, “I want to milk it a little more.”

When Nelligan finally surfaces, she’s coughing and gasping, having swallowed a mouthful of water. After she catches her breath, she good-naturedly complains, “I’m not getting enough money for this.”

Reiner immediately turns and shouts downstairs at one of the film’s producers: “Katie Jacobs! Do we have a little more money for Kate Nelligan?”

As the actress slides down back into the tub, Reiner slyly removes a wad of bills from his pocket. After the scene is finished, he leans over the tub and hands her a fistful of money. “Just a token of our good intentions,” he says.

Nelligan is still laughing when Reiner turns and shouts downstairs: “Cancel the call to Glenn Close! We’re doing fine up here!”

The roots of film parody are surprisingly deep. As a kid, Neal Israel remembers watching Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca satirize “From Here to Eternity” on “Your Show of Shows.”

When Carl Reiner was writing “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s, he remembers seeing a Will Rogers silent-movie spoof of Douglas Fairbanks’ original “Robin Hood.” One of the silent era’s classics, Buster Keaton’s “The General,” began as a spoof of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”

Many of today’s spoofsters grew up reading Mad magazine’s monthly movie parodies, which made fun of popular Hollywood films. The Zuckers say they were also inspired by Woody Allen’s “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?,” which dubbed jokey English dialogue over a Japanese spy film.

Spoofing the way thrillers often punctuate a tense moment by having a character step on the tail of a cat, “Fatal Instinct” has a scene in which Assante opens a medicine cabinet and--YOOOOWWWL!--a black cat leaps out.

Reiner recalls satirizing the cat-tail cliche on “Your Show of Shows,” with Mel Brooks, who was missing a back molar, supplying the cat’s yowl.

As it turns out, it was Brooks who brought film parody back to life, directing a string of influential 1970s movie spoofs, beginning with “Blazing Saddles,” followed by “Young Frankenstein,” “Silent Movie” and “High Anxiety.”

Just as Brooks was hitting his stride, comic stage groups were beginning to flourish, inspired by the improv humor of Chicago’s venerable Second City. Los Angeles featured the Pitchell Players (managed by future studio mogul Joe Roth) and the Kentucky Fried Theatre, whose members included the Zucker brothers as well as the “Hot Shots!” team of Jim Abrahams and Pat Proft.

Parody made sporadic comebacks in the ‘80s--most notably with “This Is Spinal Tap,” Rob Reiner’s sly heavy-metal satire. But there were more disappointments, such as Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs,” than there were hits like the Zucker brothers’ “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” It took the surprise 1991 box-office success of “Hot Shots!” and “Naked Gun 2 1/2” to spark a new cycle of spoofs. Add to that roster “Wayne’s World,” which went from a “Saturday Night Live” skit to a $120-million-grossing movie and you have an impressive series of box-office triumphs.

“Parodies are popular with studios because you’re basically getting a cheap sequel,” says Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman Peter Guber. “You’re getting the momentum and resonance--the creative conceit of a celebrated picture--but you’re remaking it without having to pay for the rights or hire the big-name stars.

“And because there’s such a huge audience that’s seen the original film, you get to trade off on a series of jokes that are part of a common language.”

Parodies are almost perfect illustrations of Hollywood conventional wisdom, as defined by the notorious Katzenberg Memo. They are cheap to make, don’t require high-priced star talent, are simple to market and, if successful, can become instant franchises.

“One of the great things about parodies is that you can actually do better box office with the sequel,” says Fox Executive Vice President Tom Sherak. “If your first movie is funny, audiences want more. ‘Naked Gun 2 1/2’ did better than the original, and we think ‘Hot Shots Deux’ will outperform our first ‘Hot Shots!’ as well.”

And, as “Loaded Weapon” has proved, when you make fun of a familiar film, you have instant recognition for your marketing campaign.

“Their advertising is built into the picture--they get to use the genre they’re spoofing to sell the movie,” says Imagine Films’ co-chairman Brian Grazer. “It’s concept marketing. In the first five seconds, you show people the genre. Then you make fun of it for the next 25 seconds. And wham--you’ve got your TV spot.”

With the exception of “Naked Gun 2 1/2,” which cost a little more than $25 million, most of the recent spoofs have been made for far less than the $27-million industry average. “Hot Shots!” was made for about $15 million. “Loaded Weapon” came in at about $10 million, while the rap parody “CB4” was made for a rock-bottom $6 million.

With these costs, when you have a hit, profits are high. Both “Naked Gun” films grossed more than $80 million, as did “Hot Shots!” “Wayne’s World,” which cost only $14 million to produce, was ranked by Variety as the most profitable film of last year.

Thanks to the worldwide sweep of American TV and film, parody movies make even more money overseas. As Neal Israel puts it: “Now that you can see just as many American cop shows in Manila as in Miami, people all over the world know all the cliches we’re making fun of.”

Somehow it seems emblematic of today’s culture that Hollywood studios can profit from films that ridicule the studios’ very lack of inspiration or originality. The parodies’ self-referential nature--they couldn’t exist without a wealth of previously experienced bad movies and TV shows--makes them a perfect fit for today’s inside show-biz whirl of weekend-gross charts, test-screening hype and celebrity gossip reports.

“These movies definitely play on the whole idea of media overload,” says “Wayne’s World” director Penelope Spheeris. “In our test screenings, whenever we came to something that spoofed TV--the ‘Laverne & Shirley’ stuff, the ‘Terminator’ cop who gives Mike (Myers) a ticket--we got a big laugh. I think it kept the audience in a certain pop-culture comfort zone.”

Call movie spoofs Classic Rock Comedy. Aging baby-boomer pop fans prefer listening to rock stations that play familiar favorites. And now moviegoers enjoy seeing films filled with jokes about movies they’ve already seen.

“Jane Wagner calls it the fin de siecle panic factor,” Spheeris says of the comic writer. “We can’t let anything go, so our way of hanging onto it is by making fun of it.”

In an era when Hollywood studios are busy remaking old TV shows, monster movies and foreign thrillers, parody is a comfortable concept.

“You don’t see anyone parodying ‘Howards End,’ ” says Imagine Entertainment production chief David Friendly, who has been developing an action-movie parody called “Blow Hard!” “For parody to work with audiences, you have to satirize a movie that’s been a big hit, something that’s already familiar and recognizable.”

Just don’t wait too long. “You better parody something right away because it’s going to become self-parody very fast,” says Gene Quintano.

The familiarity factor also plays into the casting process. It’s no coincidence that spoofs use aging TV stars or B-movie actors, people like Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges and William Shatner, as foils for their humor.

“I don’t think what we did could’ve existed without TV, especially the TV of the ‘50s that we grew up on,” says Jim Abrahams. “When we wrote the first draft of ‘Airplane!’ we wanted Robert Stack for the part simply because of the way he’d played Eliot Ness in ‘The Untouchables.’ ”

Of course, the true test of movie parodies is whether they make people laugh. “In a romantic comedy you don’t have to end every scene on a punch line,” David Zucker explains. “But in Spoofland, if you don’t end every scene with a punch line, you’re lost.”

If a joke flunks its test at a research screening, it disappears instantly. Abrahams, who often sits in preview audiences armed with a tape recorder, says all his films end up running 87 minutes. “We’re pretty ruthless. You’re always trying to shorten the elapsed time between jokes. If the audience doesn’t laugh, it’s out.”

Zucker estimates that the rough-draft script of the upcoming “Naked Gun 33” runs about 150 pages. By the time filming begins, it will have been winnowed to 115 pages. By the time it reaches the test-screening process, another 15 pages will be gone.

“No matter what we do, our first preview is always a disaster,” he says. “There’s always 20 minutes that just doesn’t work. The problem is that it’s spread all throughout the movie, so every scene seems a little long.”

The Zuckers traditionally preview their parodies at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which has a cluster of movie theaters on the third floor. After his first disastrous preview, when nobody laughed and he was totally depressed, David Zucker noticed that there was only one tiny railing to protect someone from tumbling three stories down.

It immediately became known as the Director’s Rail.

“When you spoof a movie, you’re really a gladiator,” Zucker says. “You’re out there by yourself. If the audience doesn’t laugh, judgment is swift. It’s either funny or it’s not.”