Serial Mom Movie Review

There comes a time in every femme fatale's movie life when she looks at the scripts she's being offered and realizes, “Hey, no one's offering me parts where I get to say lines like, ‘I never forget a face once I've sat on it.’ I'd better start thinking about my next career move.” In the case of Kathleen Turner, then 39, 1994's Serial Mom was it. When she made her screen debut in Body Heat in 1981, John Waters was just beginning to think in terms of conventional casting; Divine alone might not have lured mallrats into multiplexes to see Polyester, but DIVINE AND TAB HUNTER?! Times change and now even Sam Waterston, who ordinarily plays candidates for canonization, is on hand as a latter-day Carl Betz to Turner's twisted Donna Reed. Also in Serial Mom are Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard as the kids, Misty and Chip; Mink Stole, Patty Hearst, and Mary Jo Catlett as the Serial Mom's nemeses; L7 as the house band; and even Traci Lords, Joan Rivers, and Suzanne Somers in cameo roles. For the most part, Serial Mom is a sick and cynical film about the sick and cynical homage mass murderers receive in our society. But, since Waters admittedly reads the books and sees the films about assorted lunatics who inspired this film, he makes no effort to supply an antidote to the media's obsession with them. Instead, his perspective flips back and forth between the ultra-correct Serial Mom AND her poor victims who have the bad taste to watch Chesty Morgan videos under the blankets or to sing along with lousy Hollywood musicals while eating meat. When Serial Mom isn't stalking prey, she's shown in a flattering, if extreme light. After all, garbage men, uh, sanitation engineers adore her. With a few exceptions (the Chesty Morgan fanatic and Patty Hearst as Juror #8, who commits the blunder of wearing white shoes after Labor Day), the nicest thing you can say about Serial Mom's targets is that, uh, sanitation engineers DON'T adore them. And that too dovetails into society's worship of living psychos as magazine pin-ups. Very rarely does the media focus on naming, much less characterizing, the ghosts they leave behind. Serial Mom, in Waters’ own demented way, is a film of deep moral intensity, with a solemn respect for homespun values. Just rent Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt afterward for an in-your-face clue to its satirical roots. (Cast Note: Turner next joined the ensemble cast of 1995's Moonlight and Valentino, Waterston went on to make John Duigan's The Journey of August King, Lake re-made the 1950 Barbara Stanwyck film noir No Man of Her Own as 1996's Mrs. Winterbourne, and Lillard signed on for the 1995 Iain Softley flick, Hackers, as well as the blockbusters Scream and Scream 2.)

1994 (R) 93m/C Kathleen Turner, Ricki Lake, Sam Waterston, Matthew Lillard, Justin Whalin, Mink Stole, Mary Jo Catlett, Traci Lords; Cameos: Suzanne Somers, Joan Rivers, Patty Hearst; D: John Waters; W: John Waters; M: Basil Poledouris. VHS, LV, Letterbox, Closed Caption