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Chip and his friends watch several gratuitously gory films, seeking out the most depraved violence they can find, just for the kicks. Throughout the film, various characters criticize violent media, particularly the violent movies that Beverly’s son Chip finds so engaging. The fact that the band is made up of young women is significant, offering a stark contrast to the strict gender roles found elsewhere in the film.
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Though her friends warn her not to go inside, Beverly runs through a punk rock show towards the end of the film, to find it full of regular fun-loving teenagers, there to see a band of empowered young women perform high-energy rock music. One of the targets of the aforementioned Phil Donahue show was the culture of punk rock and the potential danger of mosh pits. Perhaps the best example of this is the extended sequence at the punk-rock concert. Much of the film’s then shocking content would not even register for modern audiences.
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Matthew Lillard and Ricki Lake in Serial Mom This dichotomy is illustrated directly by Kathleen Turner’s rapid code-switching between mother and murderer. Of course for Waters, these values are a mask to hide the fact that the supposedly normal moral majority are “just as sick of the rest of us”. The suburbs served as an escape from cultural progress, as a place where the traditions and values of the pre-60’s world still held true. Indeed, the film shows a seemingly idyllic life not far from the perfect family seen in 1950’s sitcoms. Waters saw these people as hypocrites, clinging to a way of life discarded by the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. While there are still groups concerned with the amount of sex and violence in media today, there is nothing like the organized moral majority movement of the 80’s and 90’s. With the specter of communism all but vanquished, cold-war paranoia turned into the Satanic panic, abstinence only sex-education and The Phil Donahue Show. It’s easy to forget that the 90’s were ruled by an obsession with the potential corruption of America’s youth. The script is a sharp satire, skewering the pearl-clutching, vapors sniffing, “think-of-the-children” crowd in a way that hardly makes sense today. Where his early films with Divine were messy scatter-shot and veered aggressively into poor taste, Serial Mom is a relatively restrained singular vision in the service of a larger narrative.
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Kathleen Turner is comically two-faced, switching between a Stepford-esque housewife and maniacal mustache-twirling villain. The film is full of memorable one-liners, over-the-top acting and bizarrely twisted visual comedy. Waters has proved himself, if nothing else, as a master of camp. While Beverly takes pains to cover up her involvement in the murder, it isn’t long until her warped idea of justice causes her to kill again. Her first murder comes in response to Chip’s suspension from school, after his macabre artwork is discovered by the principal. When we meet her at the start of the film, she hasn’t murdered anyone, but torments her neighbor Dottie Hinkle with obscene phone calls and letters.
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For Beverly, her reasons are minor slights or perceived slights, particularly regarding her two children, Chip (Matthew Lillard) and Misty (Ricki Lake) or a failure to follow insignificant social rules. Most serial killers have a reason for selecting their victims, or a particular manner of murder. Yes, this is a comedy, and yes it is actually funny. The film stars Kathleen Turner as Beverly Sutphin, a suburban home-maker and stay-at-home mom with intense psychological issues that turn her into a mass-murderer. Released in 1994, the film is Water’s reaction to the resurgence of the hyper-sanitized moral majority. John Water’s “Serial Mom” is an often overlooked and nearly forgotten cult film that highlights the vast cultural differences between the early 90’s and today.