![]() ![]() ![]() (One woman gushes that she “just loves Bill Cosby pictures,” which ends up proving the point even further when watched today.) Waters helped influence the New Queer Cinema movement, and it’s easy to see why watching Serial Mom. Beverly’s affable husband Eugene ( Sam Waterston) is a dentist with a sadistic streak of his own (“Help me, Betty! He’s worse than the dentist in Marathon Man!”) her daughter Misty ( Ricki Lake) acts like a boy-crazy teenage girl despite clearly being in her late twenties the rest of Beverly’s town is filled with shallow, stupid hypocrites who only look past the surface when it’s convenient for them. Serial Mom contains Waters’ nightmarish, Technicolor vision of suburbia in a package that’s more polished than something like Pink Flamingos but no less strange or unsettling. The anticipatory glee on her face when she’s about to run over her son’s teacher? That smile she gives when Betty Sterner discovers her hiding in her closet? The way she bellows “ wear your seatbelt!” at an unlucky witness while stabbing through the roof of his car? Gold, I tell you.Īs for the idea that the satire is uneven, that doesn’t feel right, either. And while that steely look in Beverly’s eyes when she’s about to kill someone is undeniably chilling, Turner plays her with over-the-top gusto. ![]() When she torments poor Dottie Hinkle ( Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls for the mortal sin of stealing her parking space, her giddiness is as infectious as it is mean-spirited. While anyone who commits serial murders has something wrong with them, Beverly may or may not be “sick crazy,” as Ebert charges, but she’s absolutely “funny crazy.” As a housewife, her prissy neuroses and flowery sentimentality are a delight to watch - she primly reminds her son Chip (a pre-Shaggy Matthew Lillard) that they don’t use “the brown word” in their household, and she gazes longingly out a window imitating bird calls in front of two very confused police officers. Watching Serial Mom today, it’s hard to understand what its critics were talking about. (It was on the set of Serial Mom where Turner first experienced symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, an ailment that would derail her career for almost a decade.) Kathleen Turner was on a whole other level of stardom: she was an Oscar-nominated actress in hit movies like Romancing the Stone and Peggy Sue Got Married (and, indeed, The War of the Roses), and she was at the height of her fame. Debbie Harry was a supporting character in Hairspray, and Johnny Deppwas still seen as the pretty boy from 21 Jump Street when he starred in Cry-Baby. On top of that, Serial Mom had something no other Waters film had before: a bona fide A-list movie star. But there was an appetite for black comedy at the time - five years earlier, a film as nasty and corrosive as The War of the Roses grossed $160 million - and the 90s would prove to be obsessed with the dark side of suburbia. It was a tar-black comedy about a suburban housewife named Beverly Sutphin who happened to be a demented serial killer, and it was filled with Waters’ favorite things: Baltimore, suburban depravity, sexual perversion, American sensationalism, and heaping dollops of camp. Serial Mom split the difference between those two modes. The mainstream could get used to Hairspray Waters, but there was a lingering fear that Flamingos Waters could come back at any moment and terrorize the populace with chicken corpses and dog feces. At the same time, however, his reputation preceded him: he was still infamous for directing filthy, low-budget shock-o-ramas like Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos, and his subversive sensibility was always present even at his most accessible. Waters first achieved broad success with Hairspray, a bubbly celebration of 60s kitsch whose offbeat humor couldn’t hide its big heart: Rolling Stonecalled it “a family movie both the Bradys and the Mansons could adore.” Waters’ follow-up, a musical pastiche of the 50s greaser subculture called Cry-Baby, underperformed at the box office, but critics liked it well enough, and in the indie boom of the 90s he could still achieve a true breakthrough. ![]() The interview was emblematic of the strange position John Waters found himself in before the release of Serial Mom: the mainstream was curious about him, but kept him at arm’s length. ![]()
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