son, rumba, mambo..." "Eddie Torres is simply going to reinforce what Homero's doing," says Homero's wife and dance partner, Max. "He's going to raise the general level; and, as people see what you can do and what you need to learn, they're going to come to Homero They do already, by the way. Other salsa teachers come to him on the quiet to be taught steps."Over at the Sobell Sports Centre in Islington, Eddie Torres confirms his standard-raising effect. "Right now in New York, the educated dancer is kind of swallowing up the street dancer. "London is a salsa disaster," says Homero, through a mouthful of scallop. "The women aren't respected - you see them with bruises, mangled; the men learn a step or two and then they think they can improvise, flinging their partners around without knowing the correct holds. Sitting in a Euston corner cafe after his Sunday afternoon class, Homero Gonzalez plainly feels Eddie Torres and he are on the same mission, however.

Eddie Torres is Spanish-Harlem-born, self-taught and, for a decade and a half, the leading teacher, choreographer and practitioner in New York of the glitzy stylistic pot-pourri that is state-of-the-art New York salsa - a product he's now bringing to London for the first time. Homero Gonzalez is Cuban-born and trained, formerly lead Afro-Cuban dancer in the company of Havana's Tropicana, the Sadler's Wells of Latin cabarets, and since 1994 one of London's most eminent teachers and practitioners of Afro-Cuban dance - or salsa, if you insist on using the catch-all hybrid term. The genuinely funny strain of childishly fresh humour owes much to Greggio's own hammily-accented voiceover. When we see a dismembered corpse in a barn, Greggio clues us in: "It was Pavarotti, 'oo 'ad eaten a cow and farted 'imself to pieces." His is a superbly laconic voice, mixing deadpan with a smidgeon of sub-operatic emotiveness and, despite some energetic star turns from such as Shelley Winters and John Astin (Gomez from The Addams Family), it is altogether Greggio's movie. Which proves that, though it have no tongue, ham will speak with most miraculous organ.n On general release from tomorrow. Given their countries' hostile relationship and the fact that many Cubans feel salsa is a Cuban roots form misappropriated and renamed by US Latino opportunists, you might expect Homero Gonzalez to be less than enthralled by the arrival in London of Eddie Torres.

Meanwhile his belle, Charlene Tilton (the Poison Dwarf from Dallas), has disappeared with $400,000, falling into the clutches of Dr Antonio Motel (Greggio himself), who, in a nod presumably to the classical Greek name-as-fate topos, runs a baroque motel with his dead mother.The unrelenting sight gags are seventh-hand from Airplane!, as are the nugatory snatches of wordplay. Fostar must find the infamous Psycho Killer, and so descends into the bowels of The Hollywood Nuthouse to seek advice from chef/murderer Dr Animal Cannibal Pizza. Well, this is a glorious mess of a spoof psycho-killer movie, sending up The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, among many others, with a sort of bare-arsed continental surrealism which veers from the hysterically funny to the plain soporific.The plot centres on one Jo Dee Fostar (snort), a raw FBI recruit played by Billy Zane, a strangely inhuman actor who oozes around like he's made of heavily-drugged Plasticene. You might think Italian comedy is a bit like Norwegian pop music. Maybe the crew just needed a holiday.The Silence of the Hams is a new Hollywood comedy written and directed by an Italian, Ezio Greggio. The opening credits are your standard pretentiously grainy little-girl-in-a-field job; later we spy a darling sparrow nestled on a barbed-wire fence.