Is Serial Mom John Waters’ best movie?
On the bonus features of the new Scream Factory Blu-ray, the legendary writer/director says that it is. And who am I to disagree? While I think Hairspray is still his most commercially accessible film—there’s a reason it was turned into a hit broadway musical, then adapted for both the big and small screen—Serial Mom is, like Brian De Palma’s adaptation of The Untouchables, a brilliant marriage of a commercial aesthetic and the filmmaker’s true voice. It’s a movie that can appeal to everyone while still being very much a John Waters movie, and for that alone it must be considered a huge success.
Kathleen Turner plays Beverly Sutphin, an idealized 1950s-style housewife with the perfect American family: her husband (Sam Waterston) is a successful dentist and her two teenage kids (Matthew Lillard and Ricki Lake) are happy and well-adjusted. But Beverly is also a psychopath, given to terrorizing a neighbor (Waters regular Mink Stole) with horrifically obscene phone calls prone to fits of murderous rage when the simplest transgression doesn’t match her idyllic view of suburban courtesy and decency. You know the type.
One of the first jobs I ever had was at a video store around the time Serial Mom was released on VHS in 1994, and I can still remember holding my breath as I watched a bunch of unsuspecting suburban moms and dads renting the movie on a Saturday night because they liked that Kathleen Turner and the cover box looked funny. They had no idea what was in store for them, and that is the special genius of both John Waters and Serial Mom. Like its title character, this is a film that lures us in with positivity and cheery, bright photography—a visual style straight out of an old sitcom, only now in vibrant color. That Waters doesn’t alter his approach even when the movie gets dark or violent is what makes it so special; unlike films that play a similar game in which suburbia is revealed to be hiding ugly secrets (like, say, Blue Velvet), Serial Mom retains its cheeriness throughout. It makes the movie all the more demented, and this is a film that’s demented in the best possible way.
After an underwhelming DVD release years ago from HBO Video and a much, much better DVD from Universal back in 2008, Scream Factory is finally giving Serial Mom the deluxe HD special edition treatment is so clearly deserves on a new Blu-ray release. The film is presented in 1080p HD for the first time, bringing out the brightness and sunny photography while not exactly blowing us away with detail in the transfer (which appears to have been taken from an existing master). The bonus features from Universal’s 2008 DVD have been carried over, including two commentaries—one with Waters solo, the second with Waters and Turner—as well as a making-of featurette, a retrospective piece, a trailer, and, perhaps of greatest interest to horror fans, a featurette on the gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman, whose works figure prominently into Serial Mom. The only new bonus feature included in this Blu-ray is an all-new interview that finds Waters in conversation with Kathleen Turner and Mink Stole. It is, as you would expect, a great deal of fun.
It’s great to see Serial Mom find inclusion in Scream Factory’s ever-growing library of titles, if only because it’s a bit different than the movies they generally release; even as a horror comedy, it’s much more comedy than horror. The fact that it celebrates horror movies (a few of the characters, including the one played by Matthew Lillard, are obsessed) and manages to work in some over-the-top gore make it a must for genre fans, while its status as John Waters' best work should make it essential viewing for fans of movies of any kind. While most of the bonus content has already been available, the HD improvements and new John Waters interview make the disc worth upgrading. Head on out to the store and buy it. And if you see a nice-looking mom trying to take the last spot in the parking lot… just let her have it. Trust me.
Movie Score: 4/5, Disc Score: 4/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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