![]() ![]() ![]() In close-up, Waters reveals the squashed, bloody insect body. She grabs the swatter, takes aim and hits her mark. The culprit is a buzzing fly who flits from plate to plate, leaving fly goo on the toast and juice. Beverly, cereal box in hand, is rudely interrupted while serving breakfast to her family. Waters’ twisted touch is evident from the first scene. But you can practically hear Waters snickering behind the camera: “The better to fool you with, my dear.” Big bad wolf Waters assimilate? Never! ![]() Cinematographer Robert Stevens ( The Barbs) contrives to make everything look normal. 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. ![]() 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. It wasn’t used because it was weird or shocking, but because it was just the opposite.John waters and Kathleen Turner bring out the sicko best in each other in Serial Mom. The Lake Drive residence was the embodiment of that different direction. “Not the usual John Waters movie about crazy people in a crazy world, but a movie about a normal person in a realistic world doing the craziest thing of all as the audience cheers her on!” “Serial Mom,” by contrast, was “a ‘true’ story about ‘real people’ set right up the street from where you live,” he said he told the studio executives when he pitched the movie. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder,” Waters wrote that he thinks the appeal of “Serial Mom” for a Hollywood studio was that it was a departure from his earlier movies where he showed a cavalcade of misfits on the fringe of society. According to the listing, it has 2,908 square feet on two levels, including a large living room with a wood-burning fireplace, updated kitchen, hardwood floors and lots of natural light. The price is $630,000.īuilt in 1950, the house was part of a community started by Stanley Black, one of the founding partners of the Black & Decker company. The listing agent for the Serial Mom house is Alex Hodges of Cottage Street Realty in Northern Virginia. Two locations were used for Dottie Hinkle’s residence, 618 Lake and the front lawn of a house on Club Lane. The house at 602 Lake Drive served as the home of Rosemary Ackerman (the snoopy neighbor who doesn’t recycle, played by Mary Jo Catlett). Other houses near the “Serial Mom” house had supporting roles in the film. The Baltimore County Courthouse at 400 Washington Ave., provided the setting for the big court scene at the end where Serial Mom is found not guilty and set free to kill again. Towson Senior High School was where Beverly murders her son’s math teacher after giving him a fruit cake. Kathleen Turner in “Serial Mom.” Image via IMDB. ![]()
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