#Serial mom 1994 film movie
#Serial mom 1994 film serial
#Serial mom 1994 film trial

#Serial mom 1994 film movie

Waters is the George Cukor of bad girls and white-trash women, and directing his first real movie star, he gets a rise out of the recently dormant Kathleen Turner. The real world has caught up with him, and his off-kilter comedy seems disappointingly mundane and mainstream. And the murders themselves - Turner clubs one woman with a leg of lamb - are unforgivably unfunny, almost an afterthought. Turner looks deranged and dangerous from the beginning, and by the time her husband discovers her secret cache of tapes from Ted Bundy and pen-pal letters from Richard Speck, the gag's already worn pretty thin. Waters spoils his own joke by giving the game away too fast. 'You're bigger than Freddie and Jason,' says her son, admiringly.

#Serial mom 1994 film trial

ДЄs she goes to trial - choosing to defend herself - Turner becomes an instant celebrity, and even a feminist heroine. Humming Barry Manilow tunes through a grimace, she whacks neighbors who don't recycle, who scoff at seat-belt laws, who wear white heels after Labor Day, who enjoy the musical 'Annie' and don't rewind their rented videotapes. Then she blithely heads for the car wash and home to make the perfect meatloaf.ДЄfter Mom snaps, she turns her penchant for well-meaning murder toward anyone who offends her meticulous standards.

Next thing you know, Mom is backing the family station wagon over the teacher in the school parking lot (in a familiar Waters gross-out touch, bloody chewing gum pops out of the victim's mouth). 'Well you're doing something wrong,' snipes the teacher. 'We're a loving and supportive family,' she protests, politely. Waters retraces the odd odyssey of this cereal-pourer-turned-serial killer in flashback, as Turner is called in for a parent-teacher conference about gore-obsessed Chip. no one involved in the crimes received any kind of financial compensation.' The camera descends from the clouds, into the azalea-choked suburbs of Baltimore and the magazine-perfect kitchen of Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner), who is sunnily serving up cereal to her kids Misty and Chip.ДЄfter Chip utters an expletive at the table, she reprimands him, 'You know how I hate the brown word.' The movie begins with a deadpan disclaimer: 'This film is a true story.

#Serial mom 1994 film serial

The outre auteur starts with a one-joke idea - a comedy about a serial killer - that's worth only a chuckle to begin with, then re-visits familiar themes - bloodthirsty pop culture, crime and glamour, the meanness and perversity behind smug, censorious middle-class surfaces - that Waters handled definitively 20 years ago in 'Female Trouble.' 'Serial Mom' is offensively tame and almost (gasp) tasteful. We've come to expect more from Baltimore's own king of kitsch, the pope of puke.

Men will look upon her for a thousand years and say, 'This was her weirdest hour.THERE ARE ABOUT 15 minutes of laughs in 'Serial Mom.' That's a decent score for a comedy by anyone else, but this is a John Waters movie. But in 'Serial Mom' La Turner has found the part of a lifetime. And of late she's always looked like she was capable of eating her colleagues in her huge, Tallulah-like way. It's not that she got small, it's that the movies got smaller. Waters is just thinking wacky with a capital W: What's the least likely thing she'd do? Then he has her do it: The movie's like a master's thesis in non sequiturs.Д«est of all is Turner in a performance that may save a career. Anyway, the humor is sufficiently broad to keep most of the audience that hasn't yet left in stitches, particularly as witty Beverly comes up with a defense mode that might be called the old flying knees gambit. I liked it better when she killed people. Ultimately, of course, Beverly is caught, becomes Tabloidized - here the 'satire' becomes a bit heavy-handed - is tried and serves as her own defense lawyer. Waters has his best fun with other icons of 'taste' and loves adolescent gross-out humor: In one scene, a woman encourages her dog to lick her feet, then settles back to watch 'Annie' on the VCR.