Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
In an age where true crime gawking infests every other tile of every streaming service, it may seem like America’s cheap and tawdry murder-lust is a bit of a modern phenomenon, or at least one most obvious now that all life (and death) must become Content. But real murder, scandal and ruination has long captivated audiences, especially in the country where O.J. Simpson’s trial became a defining media sensation and a racial reckoning. But even before the glove and Bronco show made this point so obviously, John Waters made it in his 1994 satire Serial Mom. Released a few months before the killings and the car chase, Waters’ black camp comedy is pessimistic towards its nation of rubberneckers. Led by a hilariously committed Kathleen Turner as a sitcom socio in charge of her nuclear family, Waters’ film flips conservative fear-mongering on its head in flippant, fun fashion. Serial Mom is now streaming on Netflix.
Serial Mom fits into Waters’ mid-career period of making subversive studio pictures that retained his midnight movie sensibility despite their production sheen. Following Hairspray and Cry-Baby (though erring toward the latter’s commercial failure and cult appeal), Serial Mom takes a single joke and runs wild with it: What if June Cleaver had a meat cleaver? Turner is perfectly composed here, pursuing her prey with a laser focus and plasticky politeness. She also delights in her crimes, which only makes the movie’s punchline (that everyone is eventually on her side) all the darker.
It’s a premise simple enough to hold all the snarky criticism Waters infuses into his film, whether it’s directed at bloodthirsty advocates of the death penalty or those fretting over the dire influence of horror films. In one of Serial Mom’s funniest juxtapositions, it’s not Herschell Gordon Lewis’ seminal splatter flick Blood Feast that accompanies an actual murder, but John Huston’s goody two-shoes adaptation of Annie. And it was all saved from a studio re-cut by a blabbermouth gossip columnist who ended up putting the executives on blast before they could touch Waters’ vision.
But even this behind-the-scenes drama reveals the theme of the film: Danger lies in squareness, in safety, in the pillars of community. Turner’s killer housewife turns the implements of domesticity (kitchen knives, tailoring scissors, even a particularly bludgeon-like piece of dinner) against those who’ve slighted her or her family in some minor way. You step out of line? Instant death! It’s an ultra-silly, slasherfied, maternal take on right-wing fantasies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.