B*A*P*S

Word of advice to Halle Berry: Get a new agent.

Last seen in the awful "Rich Man's Wife," she returns in the dreadful "B*A*P*S." Which may explain why she's doing television commercials for Revlon.

"B*A*P*S" stars Berry and Natalie Desselle as a distaff Laurel & Hardy who search for success (and love) in all the wrong places. They should be searching for a script.

Directed by Robert Townsend ("Hollywood Shuffle," "Meteor Man"), the film is loaded with heavy-handed slapstick and silliness that the cast and crew apparently enjoyed while filming but which translates to tedium for the audience.

Berry and Desselle play eccentric waitresses who live together and barely make enough money to scrape along. They dream of owning a combination restaurant/hair salon, though their fashion sense is suspect, to say the least. Each has a prominent gold tooth, they wear their towering hair in ridiculous dos and their long false fingernails would make Freddy Krueger jealous.

When they see that Heavy D is doing a nationwide talent search to find a dancer for his new music video — with the winner taking home $10,000 — the girls see it as an opportunity to make a quick killing.

So, they pool their life savings, head for Los Angeles and try out for the video. The audition is, naturally, a disaster. But as they leave the studio, they are approached by a chauffeur about doing a different music video, and soon they are enjoying the luxury of a fabulous Beverly Hills estate.

But there is no video. Instead, Berry is offered $10,000 to impersonate someone. It seems aging billionaire Martin Landau is not well, and his nephew wants to make his final days happier by having Berry pretend to be the granddaughter of his long lost love.

In truth, of course, the nephew is planning to con his uncle out of his money, using Berry and Desselle as scapegoats. Landau, meanwhile, is revitalized and starts living it up.

The plot is quite dusty (it was most recently used a decade ago for a very similar effort, "Disorderlies," with the Fat Boys and Ralph Bellamy), but that could be forgiven if the film was at all funny. It's not.

Instead we have Berry and Desselle shrieking whenever they bump into celebrities (Heavy D, LL Cool J, Dennis Rodman and others put in cameos) or slipping around on the bathroom floor after getting sprayed by a bidet.

Badly timed sight gags, weak one-liners, incessant music videos and sloppy sentiment are the order of the day. The stars throw themselves into it, but to no avail.

And about halfway through the film, without explanation, the gold teeth and false fingernails are suddenly nowhere to be seen.

The same fate awaits this film in a week or so.

"B*A*P*S," which is revealed at the end of the film to be an acronym for "Black American Princesses," is rated PG-13 for profanity, vulgarity, violence, nude statues.