irst the down and dirty world of amateur hockey hit Canadian screens with movies like Slap Shot and The Mighty Ducks. But who would have thought curling was next? For Paul Gross, the Alberta-born actor whose deft comic portrayal of RCMP Constable Benton Fraser made the TV series Due South an international hit, it was a no-brainer.   In Men with Brooms, Gross trades in his mountie hat for a curling broom and rocks. The popular actor is also directing the film and he's gathered an eclectic cast of fellow Canadians to help him, including Leslie Nielsen of Naked Gun fame and Molly Parker (Sunshine, Kissed).

Now, Gross admits the leisurely sport of curling is not the most exciting topic for a feature film. But he reassures the doubtful by saying that his movie is "no more a curling movie than The Full Monty was about men stripping."   The romantic comedy revolves around four ex-members of a curling team who are reunited when they attend the funeral of their former coach. The old friends pick up their brooms again to make their late coach's dream of winning a major curling trophy come true. Parker plays the love interest. Gross, who holed up at his farm outside Stratford, Ontario to co-write Men with Brooms with John Krizanc (DaVinci's Inquest), had a rough time keeping the project from being swept under the rug.   "When I was in Los Angeles recently, I told people I was doing this thing about curling," he recalls. "It was as though I had farted. They didn't know where to look."   Canada's best-loved mountie recruited a number of professional and amateur curlers to take part in the movie's round-robin "cashspiel," a take-off on a bonspiel. And George Karrys, an Olympic silver medal-winning curler, acted as Men with Brooms' technical assistant during production in and around Toronto.   Watch for it this winter. - Valerie Gregory