Serial Mom

A sweet mother takes a little too much at heart for the defence of her family.

• Director:John Waters
• Genre:Comedy / Crime / Horror
• Runtime:93 minutes

Cast

Kathleen Turner : Beverly R. Sutphin
Sam Waterston : Eugene Sutphin, D.D.S.
Ricki Lake : Misty Sutphin
Matthew Lillard : Chip Sutphin
Scott Morgan : Detective Pike (as Scott Wesley Morgan)

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, doesn’t allow chewing gum in the household 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) – who 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. Read more

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