SERIAL MOM is a comedy I loved when it came out thirty years ago, in April of 1994. I think at the time I’d probly seen CRY-BABY, possibly POLYESTER, but I was fairly uninitiated into the films of John Waters. I just knew that at that moment he offered the perfect combination of what-we-need-right-now and what-no-one-else-is-making.
Kathleen Turner (V.I. WARSHAWSKI) stars as Beverly Sutphin, good old fashioned middle class mother, home maker, bird lover, cookie baker. She lives in a huge house with her dentist husband Eugene (Sam Waterston a few months before starting on Law & Order), college-age daughter Misty (Ricki Lake, filming right before she started her talk show) and high schooler son Chip (Matthew Lillard, who had only been in GHOULIES III: GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE). They’re a family who get along well, and eat breakfast together every morning, sharing the newspaper. Beverly knows the garbage men by name and waves to them through the window. She hates flies and gum to a possibly unhealthy extent, but she seems like a nice lady.
The seeming tranquility of the Sutphins’ world is interrupted when detectives Pike (Scott Morgan, SPECIES II) and Gracey (Walt MacPherson, THE EXORCIST III) show up to ask them if they know anything about their neighbor Dottie Hinkel (Waters regular Mink Stole) receiving an obscene note. When Beverly reads the note and says “Oh dear, that is just the limit!” Chip says, “I wanna see!” and Eugene folds the letter up saying, “No, son. This is a matter for adults.” Some directors might leave the content of the message to our imagination, and it would still be funny, but Waters knows it’s funnier for us to see “I’LL GET YOU PUSSY FACE” spelled out in a collage of letters from a magazine, like a ransom note.
Beverly insists that “I’ve never even said the p-word out loud, let alone written it down,” but in the next scene we’ll learn that neither is true. When no one’s around she goes to make an obscene phone call to Dottie, something she’s apparently been doing for a while. And as the title implies, her crimes will soon escalate. Her first kill is Chip’s teacher Mr. Stubbins (John Badila, MY NAME IS BILL W.), who she runs over in the school parking lot after a parent-teacher conference. (For some reason everybody in the movie refers to parent-teacher conference day as a “PTA meeting,” but there was no Neil Degrasse Tyson back then to call them out on those type of inaccuracies.)
Beverly seems to enjoy killing that guy, and goes on to murder several other people, sometimes for slights against her family (standing up Misty for a date, ignoring dental advice), sometimes for witnessing her crimes. For example Chip’s friend Scotty Barnhill (Justin Whalin, THE DEAD POOL, CHILD’S PLAY 3) has the misfortune of seeing Beverly beat Emmy Lou Jensen (Patsy Grady Abrams, “Customer #2,” America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back) to death with a lamb chop while she’s watching ANNIE.
I don’t think I’d seen this in at least 25 years, and I figured I’d still like it, but I was surprised just how hard it made me laugh. I think it plays even better now than it did then. Everyone in it is so funny, they all have the exact right tone. On a DVD commentary track recorded in 1999 Waters describes the performances as realistic, but to me they’re something different than that. They have a very particular camp quality to them – the specific style they remind me of is the original live action version of FRANKENWEENIE. It’s completely deadpan, everyone’s acting like they believe it, and not laying it on too thick, but it’s not naturalism. For example, I do not believe if a guy walked into a public restroom at a fleamarket while eating a shishkebab and saw a dead body in front of the urinals he would make a fist and turn his head from side to side like this while screaming. But I’m glad this guy does it.
Of course the amazing thing about the movie is seeing ridiculous stuff like that in a vehicle for a genuine movie star like Turner, giving a fully dedicated performance. You really gotta respect her for having the audacity to play this role, with this filmmaker, and it’s hard to imagine this movie without her (though Waters’ first choice Julie Andrews would’ve also been something to see). It’s just so funny to see her doing this juxtaposition of parody wholesomeness and wicked lewdness. To see the star of ROMANCING THE STONE and the star of DESPERATE LIVING on a split screen yelling “MOTHERFUCKER!” and “COCKSUCKER!” at each other.
Or to see her perfectly executing jokes like the one where she interrupts her defense lawyer during the trial to tell him something she believes is very important:
(Juror #8 is played by Patricia Hearst, BIO-DOME.)
At first SERIAL MOM seems like that thing that was so popular in the ‘80s, the subversion of the old Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best type of TV sitcom family. Yes, they seem like the perfect clean cut suburban family but there’s a dark undercurrent. It needed to happen – pop culture had created an idea of the American dream that was limiting and oppressive and needed to be punctured – but it’s pretty corny now. Not enough to hang a movie on.
And this could almost be that because they have a perfect house, perfect lawn, they get dressed up and go to church together on Sunday and she wears pearls, everyone in town knows Eugene because he’s their dentist. One of the detectives even mockingly calls Beverly “Beaver Cleaver’s mother.” But she has this secret life – before the murders, she’s already corresponding with serial killers and reading about Charles Manson in bed.
And yet I don’t think it can be Waters’ satire of “the perfect family” because he obviously loves Beverly! Okay, yeah, it is extreme behavior to harass a neighbor with obscene letters and phone calls because (as revealed in a flashback) she stole your space in the parking lot of Jo-Ann Fabrics (the one over there by the Radio Shack and the Sizzler). But, I mean, watch them in the split screen – the fun Beverly is having vs. the offense Dottie is taking. Which one do you think Waters likes better?
Of course it’s Beverly! On the commentary track Waters says he lovingly based some of her personality on his mother, and that she took it as a compliment. And he says that he shares her hatred of people chewing gum. I think this is the lovable side of the dark underbelly of the perfect family. This is a subversion of the subversion!
In some ways it’s like a FALLING DOWN for basic courtesy. Beverly will go after somebody for not recycling, or not rewinding a rented copy of GHOST DAD. But in other ways she’s not judgmental. She doesn’t expect her kids to be a cheerleader and a quarterback – she supports Misty selling kitsch at the swap meet and Chip working at the video store and obsessing over BLOOD FEAST. She kills the teacher for saying Chip needs psychiatric help because he drew a gory picture in class (that part happened to me! The psychiatric help/gory picture part, not the teacher being run over). And she kills Misty’s asshole boyfriend Carl (Lonnie Horsey) for showing up at the swap meet with Traci Lords, but we already knew he was a fucking piece of shit because Misty showed him a Pee-wee Herman doll and he grunted “the guy’s a weirdo.”
When Chip and his Jughead-hat-wearing “horror nut” girlfriend Birdie (Patricia Dunnock, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE) learn that Chip’s mom is a serial killer they think it’s cool and help her hide. But when Birdie sees blood at one of the crime scenes then the performance becomes more realistic as she cries about it and they turn staunchly, even performatively anti-violence.
I now realize that I misunderstood SERIAL MOM at the time, because I took it to be another type of movie that was very popular at that specific point in the ‘90s: the impressionistic satire of the violence-and-celebrity-obsessed media landscape of the time. Movies were very concerned with making fun of “tabloid TV,” back when sleaziness was relegated to one half hour or hour a day, having no clue how much worse it would get. So it’s humorous to see this goofy story with text at the beginning claiming it’s a true story but “some of the innocent characters’ names have been changed in the interest of a larger truth” (pretty much the same joke the Coen Brothers would do a couple years later on FARGO), and pretending each ridiculous turn of the plot is historic by putting the date and time on the screen. When Beverly gets in trouble Chip excitedly asks “Are we gonna be on A Current Affair?,” and the real ludicrousness starts after she’s arrested and goes on trial. Suzanne Somers agrees to play Beverly in a movie and starts attending the trial, causing even the judge to be more focused on Hollywood shit than the matter at hand. Chip starts wearing a beret and making deals over a cell phone. She might be too famous now to not get away with it.
When NATURAL BORN KILLERS covered similar material in a less fun way I always said SERIAL MOM did it better. (Which to be fair you could say for many things.) But one thing I was missing is that Stone and Waters weren’t trying to say the same thing at all. Stone is saying “isn’t it sick the way we glorify violence?” and Waters is saying “isn’t it fun the way we glorify violence?” Or at least it seems to me that way now. In an interview with David E. Williams and Dave Parker in Film Threat at the time, Waters said, “Basically the movie is, in a way, saying that America had made serial killers into the new celebrities… I’m neither for or against it, but I can see both sides… I’m not going to take a position on this, except on how absurd it is. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, because I’m interested even in things that are wrong.”
So I don’t think he’s criticizing our fascination with true crime, I think he’s celebrating his own! In the commentary he talks about the movie being inspired by his years of going to trials, and confesses that Beverly’s serial killer scrapbook includes actual correspondence between himself and some infamous serial killers. I guess one thing that’s special about John Waters is he makes things that would be absolute dealbreakers coming from other people seem charming and delightful coming from him. He just seems so happy and positive about being someone the Carls of the world would dismiss as a weirdo.
There’s one statement he definitely meant to make: he’s very against capital punishment, unlike the local pastor here, who notes in his sermon that “Jesus said nothing against capital punishment as he hung on the cross.”
For many of us even then, it was cool to see a movie starring Kathleen Turner that had references to Herschell Gordon Lewis and Chesty Morgan and shit. I’m not into that stuff personally but I like that Waters gets a kick out of it. He says on the commentary that he meets 20 year olds who really are into that shit, and he loves that they have such respect for “their filth elders.” Because he’s putting in references to the things he’s a fan of it doesn’t have as many 1994-specific references as some other movies of the time. Chip’s room is a shrine to decades old horror movies, and Scotty’s wall decorations include the logo for the 1978 XXX WESTWORLD parody SEXWORLD. The only current poster I noticed anywhere was for the band L7, but that’s because they appear in the movie playing the band Camel Lips. (Beverly burns Scotty alive on stage during their show and the crowd loves it and chants “Serial Mom”!)
At the time I perceived SERIAL MOM as a mainstream release. I remember seeing it in a small but non-arthouse theater, and taking home promotional postcards for it. Savoy Pictures was an indie company that only existed from 1992 to 1997, never really had a big hit, and also fought with Waters and tried to get him to change the ending (but he refused). It didn’t make back its modest budget in theaters. Note that earlier in the year we got CABIN BOY (also featuring Ricki Lake!) and HUDSUCKER PROXY, two really distinct comedies that were big flops at the time, and widely derided, though still beloved today except by no good bozos, etc. Something in the air, I guess. Maybe it would be worth taking a closer look at that period of time.
* * *
The 30th anniversary of SERIAL MOM was a couple weeks ago, April 13th. I’m writing about now not just for its anniversary, but as an intro to my new review series, a so-far-untitled retrospective of the summer films of 1994. This is one of the Spring releases that year that I felt should be part of the proceedings. Also released that April were RED ROCK WEST, SURVIVING THE GAME, BRAINSCAN, and NO ESCAPE. Next I’ll be reviewing two youth-oriented comedies released later that month.
So here’s a little preview of my plans for the summer. Of the movies I hope to cover in this series there are several that I’ve reviewed before but that seem too crucial not to revisit, around 20 that I’ve never seen before, and most of the rest I haven’t seen since the ‘90s. Since ’94, in many cases. So I can’t be sure where this series will go – you never know what you’re gonna get, am I right? – but my guess is that the main theme is a shift going on in the culture.
In the summer of ’94 they celebrated the 25th anniversary of Woodstock with a concert that included Candlebox, DJ Spooky, Aphex Twin, Cypress Hill, Nine Inch Nails, Primus, Arrested Development and Green Day. So it was a time when pop culture was still dominated by boomers, but beginning a shift toward generation X. Generational labels are, of course, huge generalizations – John Waters was born in 1946, the oldest possible boomer, but SERIAL MOM’s attitude seems more in line with people my age. But I want to explore ’94 in these terms because at this particular moment in time the youngest gen-xers had recently hit their teens, and the oldest were about to turn 30. So they were just starting to become a force as filmmakers and moving pop culture in a different direction, but boomers (who were between 30 and 48) were on top and really putting their concerns and interests into the movies.
The kids of the boomers, my age and older, grew up watching our parents’ nostalgia. It told us that the world orbited around Woodstock, Vietnam, JFK and Watergate, and the things that people shaped by those moments in time found to be important. Some of it was cool shit – I still love Jimi Hendrix. But most of us were shaped by newer phenomenons like MTV and hip hop. And uh, Star Wars and toy cartoons.
At this moment in 1994, movies were on the verge of some huge changes. A new wave of Black filmmakers was rising, and with PULP FICTION due in October the fuse was already lit for an indie film explosion. Digital FX were new and still exciting, even a selling point for seeing movies – at least two of these I remember seeing in the theater for that specific reason. The Ain’t It Cool News was only two years away, a more “geek” and comic book dominated movie culture would follow in its wake, and some of the seeds of those movements will be spotted in this summer, I suspect.
I will be reviewing three movies based on TV shows from the ‘50s and ‘60s – four if you count LION KING as being based on Kimba the White Lion – and a couple others based on older things that the same people might’ve watched in reruns. I will also be reviewing the second biggest movie of the year, which will win best picture, and it’s one of the most boomer nostalgia oriented movies ever made, with a popular 2-CD soundtrack dominated by ’60s hits, and a protagonist intersecting with generation defining events like the Vietnam War, Woodstock, and the March on Washington.
For people my age, one of those generation defining moments had actually just happened – on April 8th we’d learned of the death of Kurt Cobain. In subsequent years it would inspire many documentaries, an arty Gus Van Sant movie (LAST DAYS) and at least two road movies about fans traveling to the memorial (THE VIGIL and HIGHWAY). FORREST GUMP character Richard Nixon would die on the 22nd, prompting 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney (a member of “The Greatest Generation”) to lament his death being overshadowed by Cobain, who he’d never heard of. “What would all these young people be doing,” he asked, “if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II, or Vietnam?” I guess we’ll never know, since they ended up fixing everything and we never had to deal with any other wars or economic problems or anything.
Other things happened in April ’94 that still reverberate today. Nas released Illmatic, for example. I don’t want to be too corny about this shit, but the world was changing. South Africa adopted a new post-apartheid flag on the 20th, had their first multiracial elections on the 27th, making Nelson Mandela their first democratically elected president. So this was a summer movie season that happened while the earth was moving around under our feet, and also there was a big expensive movie based on an old cartoon sitcom about cavemen. Please join me in the coming months to contemplate what it all meant, or at least give it another look and see how it holds up three decades on. I think it will be interesting.
April 29th, 2024 at 7:38 am
Hell yeah for a new Vern series! Just this morning I thought “Man, I can’t hear all that talk about Boomers and generation X, Y, Z, @, §, µ, etc anymore and wanna throatpunch everybody who writes about it”, but don’t worry, I make an exception for you and everybody here. And I even might have a few nostalgic things to say about 94.
In the case of SERIAL MOM: It actually was a wide release in Germany. But in all fairness: Pretty much everything is a wide release here. Our distribution system is quite different from the American. I was really hyped for it. Not because of John Waters, who I didn’t know by then, but what I saw, simply looked like fun! My mother also was kinda interested, because she liked Kathleen Turner. We sadly made the mistake of watching it together when it premiered on TV and she was already so offended by it when the kids were watching that old splatter movie, that she turned it off and even yelled at me when I went to my room to watch the rest. My mother yelled at my sister and me for a lot of things, but I think that was the only time because of a movie.
Anyway, not watching it with her was a good decision, because it would’ve been one, uncomfortable watch. Later I learned that by then people already accused Waters of going soft and mainstream (and compared to his earlier works it might be true), but it still went way further than other dark comedies at that time. Especially with established Hollywood stars.
Isn’t it weird how Waters somehow managed to actually get one foot into the mainstream? One would think that certain actors or Hollywood producers wouldn’t even dare to be in the same room with the man who made an actual butthole sing in one of his movies, but by then he really managed to get a bunch of respectable actos to appear in his flicks. All while he had guest spots in shows like HOMICIDE, LAW & ORDER and THE BLACKLIST. Apparently he was also had a cameo in one of those CHIPMUNKS squeaquels and voiced a character in a Mickey Mouse cartoon!
He is the little pervert that could!