Serial Mom - John Waters

Seen for the first time in September 2012.

This is John Waters at his finest, and John Waters at his finest, see “Desperate Living,” is a brilliant film maker. Kathleen Turner is hilarious in this. The concept of making the traditional June Cleaver mom into an insane serial killer was brilliant. There’s a sensibility here that I don’t remember having been developed at this point in the early 90’s. Stereotypical sitcom mom’s were being questioned by shows like Roseanne and Married with Children, but I don’t recall effective parody of the sitcom style. I think John Waters was the first to do this. It’s more commonplace now.

The celebration of Serial Killers as celebrities is sort of less effective to me. That sort of social commentary is intrinsically off-putting to me, but Waters isn’t preachy or opinionated in any apparent way, and so the absurdity and the spectacle provide entertainment and off-kilter humor and it never irritates with didacticism.

Waters seems like too genuinely a warm person with a generous view toward people to get too serious to have fun. He laughs at the hangups of the straight-laced and revels in the weirdness of the truly weird, but it always seems to come from a place of genuine affection for humanity that I really admire, and wish I could share. I suppose this is as close to a horror movie that Waters will ever get, and I love that it’s so playful and funny. Grade A.