Independent Films, Film Profiles

Serial Mom

Serial Mom (1994) is an American satirical black comedy written and directed by John Waters, starring Kathleen Turner as the titular character, Sam Waterston as her husband, and Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard as her daughter and son. Despite statements to the contrary in the movie, the story is completely fictional. Patty Hearst, Suzanne Somers, Joan Rivers, Traci Lords and Brigid Berlin make cameos. Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Focus Features released a collector's edition DVD of the film on May 6, 2008, replacing the original HBO Home Video DVD release, which is out of print.Movies by Waters' creative influences, including Russ Meyer, Otto Preminger, William Castle and Herschell Gordon Lewis, are seen playing on television sets throughout the film.Behind her genteel facade, Baltimore housewife Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is really a sociopathic serial killer, cheerfully decimating those whom she deems a threat to her traditional family values. However, after the police finally expose her heinous crimes, she finds herself thrust into the spotlight and becomes an unwitting celebrity.Beverly Sutphin (Turner) appears to be a typical suburban housewife living with her dentist husband Eugene (Waterston) and their children Misty (Lake) and Chip (Lillard). In fact, she is really a violent sociopath whose polite manners and socially correct habits – she recycles and never wears white shoes after Labor Day – conceal her criminal behavior.Beverly's overblown reactions to everyday events lead her to committing murder. When Mr. Stubbins (John Badila), Chip's high school math teacher, criticizes her son's morbid fascination with violent horror films, she runs over him with her car, killing him. When she sees her neighbor, Rosemary Ackerman (Mary Jo Catlett), spilling litter everywhere while putting out her garbage, she flies into a murderous rage over her failure to recycle, although her rage is tempered by the arrival of the garbage men. When Misty is stood up by a date, Carl Pageant (Lonnie Horsey), and seeing him with another girl, Beverly impales him with a fireplace poker in the men's restroom.Amongst the first to suspect Beverly's criminal tendencies is her neighbor, Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole), who had been receiving anonymous vulgar and threatening letters and phone calls. After hearing Beverly's vocal inflexions at a social gathering, she realizes the identity of the perpetrator. After being interviewed by the police at his surgery, Eugene finds disturbing items hidden under their mattress, including an autographed beefcake photo of Richard Speck (addressed to her from Speck in prison), an audiotape of Ted Bundy (voice of John Waters), and a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings of Jonestown and Charles Manson. After realising her mother's role in Carl's death, Misty visits the video store where her brother works and announces to Chip and his friends, "Our mother is Charles Manson."When the Sutphins go to church that Sunday (followed by a fleet of police cars), they hear a news report on the car radio naming Beverly as the suspect in two more murders – Betty (Kathy Fannon) and Ralph Sterner (Doug Roberts) – which she killed for calling Dr. Sutphin into the office on a Saturday morning and for eating chicken (Beverly is an avid bird-watcher). When they arrive at church, they are met with scorn and suspicion by the other congregates. The church's message board announces that the day's sermon is "Capital Punishment & You." During his sermon, the priest tries to justify the death penalty by rhetorically suggesting that Jesus Christ could have spoken out against capital punishment while he was being crucified by the Romans.Police detectives confirm that Beverly's fingerprints match those at the Sterner crime scene and attempt to arrest her, but Chip and Birdie help her escape. They hide her at Chip's video rental store, where she overhears a customer named Mrs. Jensen bickering with Chip over paying a fee for failing to rewind a videotape. After renting the film version of Annie, Mrs. Jensen calls Chip a "son of a psycho." After she leaves, Chip and Birdie discover Beverly missing and realize she's en route to Mrs. Jensen's house.Beverly enters Mrs. Jensen's house while she's watching the opening credits of Annie and singing along to "Tomorrow," then bludgeons her to death with a leg of lamb in a style reminiscent of the Roald Dahl story Lamb to the Slaughter. She then notices one of Chip's friends, Scotty (Justin Whalin), spying from a window and begins chasing him. She tries to stab him with a knife through the car's convertible roof while yelling at him, "Buckle your seat belt!" Scotty drives off, but Beverly carjacks a passing van and follows him to Hammerjack's, where the all-girl band Camel Lips (L7) is playing. Scotty tries to escape by running on stage, but Beverly causes a light fixture to fall on him and sets him on fire using a cigarette lighter and an aerosol can. Her family arrives to see Scotty die and the police arrest Beverly.Beverly's trial becomes a national sensation. She is dubbed "Serial Mom" by the media, and a TV movie about the case starring Suzanne Somers is planned. Chip hires an agent to manage the family's media appearances, while Misty and her new boyfriend, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, sell merchandise about their mother's trial outside the courthouse.During opening arguments, Beverly notices that a member of the jury (Patricia Hearst) is wearing white shoes after Labor Day, a fashion faux pas. When she tries to bring this to the attention of her attorney, he dismisses her and claims that Beverly is not guilty by reason of insanity. This causes Beverly to ask that her lawyer be fired and that she be permitted to represent herself. The judge reluctantly agrees and the trial begins.Beverly proves to be quite formidable defending herself at trial. When Dottie Hinkle testifies that Beverly is her prank phone caller, Beverly's courtroom antics cause Dottie to explode in a cursing fit and the judge holds her in contempt of court. When Mrs. Ackerman takes the stand, Beverly destroys her credibility by revealing that it was her magazine which was the source for the nuisance letters to Dottie Hinkle, her fire poker used to kill Carl Pagent as he'd bought a chipped Fabergé Egg and her scissors found at the murder scene of the Sterners. Finally in a tense moment, Beverly forces Mrs Ackerman to admit that she doesn't recycle which provokes disgust from the jury. During the testimony of Marvin Pickles (Tom Caggiano) who saw her in a restroom stall with the poker just before Carl's murder, Beverly fans her legs, sexually arousing the man and at the very last shot she spreads her legs wide apart causing him to commit perjury. Loretta Hodges, the stoner who saw Beverly murder Mr. Stubbins is discredited by her intoxicated demeanor, only recalling a blue car rather than a blue station wagon. Beverly questions a police detective about the merits of judging her a criminal from her reading materials by snooping through her garbage, bolstering her argument by displaying a pornographic magazine called Chicks with Dicks, which she claims was found in the detective's trash by her garbage man friends (Bus Howard and Alan J. Wendl). Finally during the second detective's testimony, the entire courtroom is starstruck and completely distracted from crucial evidence by the sudden appearance of Suzanne Somers, who would be portraying Beverly in a TV movie.When the verdict is read and Beverly is found not guilty on all charges, she laughs relievedly and announces "Kids, I'm coming home!" to her family, who are clearly stunned by her acquittal. During the post-trial interviews, Beverly follows the juror wearing white shoes to a payphone. After lecturing the juror on the folly of wearing white after Labor Day, Beverly kills the juror by striking her in the head with the receiver and reunites with her family outside the courthouse. When the jury foreman discovers the juror's dead body, Suzanne Somers stares horrified at Beverly, who responds with a triumphant pose, realizing she is indeed "Serial Mom."