#Dreamcalc 4 5 0 serial mom tv#

Turner is brilliantly sardonic and mocking at every turn. Serial Mom wouldn't be as successful or effective as it is without Waters's witty script and Kathleen Turner's self-effacing performance. The local and national media shower Beverly with countless attention and adulation.

#Dreamcalc 4 5 0 serial mom tv#

Suzanne Somers has already inked a deal to play Beverly in a TV movie. They're well on their way! Chip becomes a talent agent. 'Can we be on Current Affair?' Chip asks his family. She transforms not into a condemned killer but a sensational media star. It's both in nearly every case.) As the body count increases, the police and press are hot on Beverly's trail. (Most of Beverly's victims are those who either got on her nerves or had ill-involvement in her family's social affairs. She becomes enraged with the teacher's complaints about her son and decides to run him over. Stevens filmed part of Serial Mom at Divine's old school where Beverly meets with Chip's math teacher. In his 1999 audio commentary included on this disc from Scream Factory, Waters talks about the general anathema he had for teachers growing up and the bullying his late friend Divine endured while attending Towson Senior High School. Waters is able to make this commentary while also injecting indictments against authoritarianism. While Serial Mom is a black comedy that gleefully lampoons situational family comedies from the fifties and sixties such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver, it is also a scandalous critique of the cult of celebrity, especially serial killers. Several of the characters act dumb but it is Waters's statement that they may not be 'all there' and just not fully in-tune with their surroundings.Д«everly wants to lead her family in saying 'Grace'-or does she? Waters continually calls into question many of the characters' social mores and whether they are really 'prim and proper.' Waters slyly unpacks how they blindly follow societal norms and laws but are actually missing the more important aspects of them.

For example, Beverly (and Waters) take perverted pleasure in hearing neighbor Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole) scream and rail against her obscene phone calls. While Serial Mom has several autobiographical elements in it, Waters's film is also a dissection of middle-class domestic conformity and complacency in suburbia. She flattens the insect like a pancake and the shot of it being squashed foreshadows Beverly's 'killer' instinct. The mother is also irritated by a pesky fly and Waters ratchets some suspense as she keenly awaits to swat it. The opening credits sequence has the Sutphins chatting away at the kitchen table as Beverly prepares breakfast. His perky sister Misty (Ricki Lake) is boy-crazy and always on the lookout for her next best date. Their son Chip (Matthew Lillard) is a clerk at a video store specializing in gore-infested, shock horror films. Her affable husband Eugene Sutphin (Sam Waterston) is a dentist and committed husband and father. Matriarch Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is a proud homemaker active in her two teenage children's school functions. The Sutphin family live a sunny and idyllic life in an upper middle-class suburban neighborhood in Baltimore. Serial Mom's story is relatively simple but there are several layers of connotative meaning simmering beneath the surface.

Equipped with the largest budget he had to date, Serial Mom allowed him to unleash his irreverent sensibilities while staying within the confines of a commercial 'R' rating. Waters has always prided himself as a crude and lewd satirist as well as a master of conflating trash with art. When Savoy Pictures unveiled Serial Mom to the public in spring of 1994, audiences either 'got' writer/director John Waters's underlying messages or they didn't.