Waters stealthily and steadily kicks ass. Though Serial Mom is a mainstream movie with a modest budget ($13 million) and a respectable R rating. There were only glimmers in his last two films, Hairspray and Cry-Baby. It’s great to see Waters up to his demented tricks again.

But Eugene (Waterston in a delicious sendup of his usually somber self) refuses to believe it, not until he finds the Charles Manson scrapbooks under Beverly’s bed and the taped messages from Ted Bundy. The kids are slow to discover the murderer in Mom. He has created a virtuous housewife who kills in the name of political correctness and family values. Waters has rarely come up with such a fiendishly comic conceit to stick it to the powers that be. Beverly loves her family so much she’d kill for them. And be nice to her nerdy dentist husband, Eugene (Sam Waterston), her lovelorn daughter, Misty (Ricki Lake), and her horror-film fanatic son, Chip (Matthew Lillard). Around her, remember to recycle your trash or wear your seat belt. We can all relate to anger of the “little things,” but Beverly acts on it. Beverly is bothered by minor infractions.

Waters would never be concerned with anything so banal. It’s not the injustice of the world that she wants to avenge. Beverly may look like Martha Stewart on ludes, but she is seething inside. Turner is dynamite in a performance that keeps springing surprises. Turner is liberated by Waters, who in turn gets a leading lady who really is a lady. Turner’s found the crack comic timing she lost after The War of the Roses also back is the go-for-broke silliness she showed in The Man With Two Brains when Steve Martin shouted, “Into the mud, scum queen.” Warshawski, House of Cards and Undercover Blues. Serial Mom is a spirited return to form for the actress after V.I. Turner, even dressed in suburban frocks that hide her Body Heat allure, gives Waters star power to spare as Baltimore’s homicidal homemaker Beverly Sutphin. There’s no forgetting Divine’s Babs in the 1972 Waters classic Pink Flamingos as she snacked on dog shit or sucked off her son, Crackers (Danny Mills), who begged: “Do my balls, Mama.”īut enough tender nostalgia. Born Harris Glenn Milstead, Divine was a 300-pound drag diva who brought heft and heart to Waters films from Mondo Trasho to Hairspray. Waters, the writer and director of such beloved cinematic outrages as Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble and Polyester, has been looking for a star big enough to personify his distinctively warped view of the mad, mad world since Divine died in 1988. It’s a killingly funny spoof of crime and nonpunishment that couldn’t have come at a better time for us or them. John waters and Kathleen Turner bring out the sicko best in each other in Serial Mom.

Serial mom soundtrack