![]() I don’t do that.” And he said, “No, no, no. I need to know exactly how you would shoot this because if it’s going to be a gore-fest, that’s not for me. So I called John and said, “Here’s the deal. I finished it, and I thought, Okay, this will either be the height of absurdity and humor, or it can be a gore-fest. It was the only thing I didn’t like when we got to doing it.Īnyway, I threw it down again, and again I went back. I started reading on, and it was fine until the lit hairspray with the kid. I got to the point where she sticks the poker in and pulls out the guy’s liver, and I went, No! Gross! I threw the script down in my office and puttered around, and then I went back to it. So when he sent me the script, I thought, Well, of course I’m going to read it. Honestly, if you’d said to me, “You’re going to do this John Waters film,” I’d have said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I had seen Cry-Baby with Johnny Depp - I liked that, but all the Divine stuff I didn’t have much of a handle on. Oh God, the first thing I think is how we laughed. When you think of Serial Mom and that era of your career, what first comes to mind? ![]() There’s never a wrong time to revisit Serial Mom, so Turner rang up Vulture to reminisce about working with Waters, and why her agents told her not to take the part - which only made her want it more. But the role was always meant to go to Turner, who was riding a career high that started with 1981’s Über-sensual Body Heat and continued with Romancing the Stone, Peggy Sue Got Married, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Accidental Tourist, and The War of the Roses. Along the way, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, and Roseanne Barr were among the actresses considered for Beverly. Serial Mom was initially developed at Columbia before landing at Savoy Pictures, a short-lived distributor co-founded by two former Columbia executives who didn’t seem to grasp the humor of the movie they’d acquired. ![]() When Beverly snaps, a mischievous glint fills Turner’s eyes, as if a demon has possessed Beverly’s body - not that she minds. Beverly is content to keep her home tidy and her family fed as long as no one insults her children, steals her parking spot, interrupts her bird-watching plans, or violates the insipid fashion codes of the upper middle class. John Waters’s 1994 satire underperformed at the box office, but today it’s considered one of the sharpest parodies of suburban life. Turner’s Beverly Sutphin is the perfect housewife, aside from, you know, all the carnage and whatnot. Serial Mom runs a jaunty 95 minutes, just enough time for Kathleen Turner to make vulgar prank calls to her scandalized neighbor (“Is this the Cocksucker residence?”), extract a teenage boy’s liver with a fire poker, bash a woman singing Annie over the head with a leg of lamb, clobber Patty Hearst with a pay phone for wearing white after Labor Day, and have acrobatic sex with Sam Waterston because murder makes her horny. Photo: Mary Evans/Polar/Everett Collection The supporting cast includes such Waters favorites as Patty Hearst, Traci Lords, Mink Stole, and Susan Lowe Joan Rivers and Suzanne Somers appear as themselves, and all-female grunge-metal band L7 plays the all-female grunge-metal band Camel Toe.On defying her agents, hitting Patty Hearst with a pay phone, hating Barry Manilow, and watching Shirley MacLaine eat a staggering number of crabs. Taking John Waters back to R-rated territory after the relatively sedate Hairspray and Cry Baby, Serial Mom captures a comfortable middle ground between Hollywood professionalism and Waters' subversive sense of humor, and Kathleen Turner has a field day as the sweet-on-the-outside, evil-on-the-inside Beverly. ![]() While she does a great job of hiding it, Beverly has a vicious and vengeful streak, and when she's not making obscene prank calls to the neighbors or bribing her garbagemen to save embarrassing items from her neighbors' trash, she's mowing down whoever would be so rude as to make her husband go into his office on a Saturday, break up with her daughter, or suggest that her son watches too many horror movies. There's just one problem with Beverly - if you do anything to make someone in her family feel bad, you're dead meat on a stick. She likes to cook, her home is immaculately clean, she's always well-groomed and cheerful, and she loves her husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) and her two children, Misty (Ricki Lake) and Chip (Matthew Lillard). Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is the perfect suburban housewife and mother.
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