Winreducer Serial Mom
. All countries. United States.
United Kingdom. Canada. Australia.
Germany. France. Spain. Italy. Argentina.
Austria. Belgium. Brazil. Bulgaria.
Chile. China. Colombia. Czech Republic.
Denmark. Finland. Greece. Holland.
Hong Kong. Hungary.
Iceland. Indonesia. Ireland.
Israel. India. Japan. Malaysia.
Winreducer Serial Mom Dies
Mexico. New Zealand. Norway. Philippines. Poland. Portugal. Romania.
Russia. Singapore. South Africa. South Korea. Sweden. Switzerland.
Taiwan. Thailand.
Kathleen Turner
Turkey. Ukraine.
United Arab Emirates. Serial Mom Blu-ray ReviewReviewed by, April 17, 2018When 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. Waters has always prided himself as a crude and lewd satirist as well as a master of conflating trash with art. 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. Serial Mom's story is relatively simple but there are several layers of connotative meaning simmering beneath the surface. The Sutphin family live a sunny and idyllic life in an upper middle-class suburban neighborhood in Baltimore.
Matriarch Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) is a proud homemaker active in her two teenage children's school functions. Her affable husband Eugene Sutphin (Sam Waterston) is a dentist and committed husband and father. Their son Chip (Matthew Lillard) is a clerk at a video store specializing in gore-infested, shock horror films.
Serial Mom Quotes
His perky sister Misty (Ricki Lake) is boy-crazy and always on the lookout for her next best date. The opening credits sequence has the Sutphins chatting away at the kitchen table as Beverly prepares breakfast. The mother is also irritated by a pesky fly and Waters ratchets some suspense as she keenly awaits to swat it.
She flattens the insect like a pancake and the shot of it being squashed foreshadows Beverly's 'killer' instinct.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. For example, Beverly (and Waters) take perverted pleasure in hearing neighbor Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole) scream and rail against her obscene phone calls. 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. 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.Beverly wants to lead her family in saying 'Grace'—or does she?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. Waters is able to make this commentary while also injecting indictments against authoritarianism. 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 and his cinematographer Robert M. Stevens filmed part of Serial Mom at Divine's old school where Beverly meets with Chip's math teacher. She becomes enraged with the teacher's complaints about her son and decides to run him over. (Most of Beverly's victims are those who either got on her nerves or had ill-involvement in her family's social affairs. It's both in nearly every case.) As the body count increases, the police and press are hot on Beverly's trail.
She transforms not into a condemned killer but a sensational media star. 'Can we be on Current Affair?' Chip asks his family. They're well on their way! Chip becomes a talent agent. Suzanne Somers has already inked a deal to play Beverly in a TV movie. The local and national media shower Beverly with countless attention and adulation.Serial Mom wouldn't be as successful or effective as it is without Waters's witty script and Kathleen Turner's self-effacing performance.
Turner is brilliantly sardonic and mocking at every turn. Sam Waterston is also wonderful in the thankless and sympathetic role as Turner's impotent husband. The rest of the cast is anchored by stellar supporting turns and cameos by some famous figures. Serial Mom is more amusing than laugh-out funny (the kill scenes aren't) but most of the dark comedic material works well.
Shout!/Scream Factory has brought Serial Mom to Blu-ray in North America for the first time as a Collector's Edition with a slipcover and one BD-50. Waters's tenth film overall has also been available on BD across Europe albeit in a bare-bones edition. Ever since Universal Pictures put out its own CE DVD in 2008, the movie's original aspect ratio of 1.66:1 has been re-framed to 1:85:1. I own the 1999 HBO Home Video DVD in which the feature is displayed in a letterboxed 1.66:1.
That is very likely the same transfer that HBO and Pioneer Video released on LaserDisc five years earlier. On the back of the LD jacket, the text reads: 'This film is presented in a 'widescreen' format preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical presentation.'
I didn't see Serial Mom in the cinema but my inkling is that it was both shot and exhibited in 1.66:1. The latter was always a tricky ratio to accommodate for 16X9 playback so it isn't surprising that HBO didn't make it anamorphic back in the early days of standard definition.
I have provided six captures apiece from the HBO and Shout! Beginning with Screenshot #9 through #20, the HBO is first and the corresponding screen grab from Shout! Is directly below it. (They may not be the exact frames but they are close.) Please click on each image for a frame enlargement.
You'll notice that there's noticeably more information on the top and bottom of the HBO; there may be a tad more picture info along the edges of the Shout! But it's negligible.HBO triumphs over Shout! On the framing ratio but the latter beats the former in every other aspect of the image.
Michael Brooke of DVD Times (now The Digital Fix) correctly observed that the colors on the HBO are washed out and the image is soft and lacks fine detail. Besides color temperature and gamma levels, the Shout! Also boasts better background detail and contrast (which is thankfully, not boosted).
HBO has video noise while Shout! Has a thin layer of grain throughout the presentation.
There are no serious image stability problems. There are, however, some occasional specks on the DI print that appear.
This seems to be the same transfer that Universal Home Entertainment used for its discs overseas. The Blu-rays also seem to look smoother and cleaner than the 2008 DVD. S MPEG-4 AVC-encoded transfer sports a mean video bitrate of 27996 kbps while the full disc clocks in at 38.96 Mbps. My video score is 3.75.Shout! Gives the ninety-four minute feature its standard twelve scene selections. (The HBO DVD has thirty-one chapter stops!).
Supplies two sound track options: a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround Sound (3362 kbps, 24-bit) and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo mix (1782 kbps, 24-bit). I primarily listened to the 5.1 track and it's overall very good. Dialogue reproduction is largely clear, coherent, and crisp.
The buzzing fly in the first reel moves laterally across the speakers to the extent that we can almost hear and feel it in our living rooms! Car vrooms exhibit range and discreteness on the satellite speakers. Basil Poledouris's family theme for the Sutphins is a pleasant melody not unlike Howard Shore's warm music for Mrs. Doubtfire a year earlier. Poledouris's score becomes more foreboding and dissonant as the film moves along.
There isn't a lot of separation in the orchestral sounds. Barry Manilow's 'Daybreak' springs to life with good fidelity. LZ's 'Gas Chamber' ballad that's performed within the film is by far the loudest piece of music.Optional English SDH are available for the feature through your remote or via Shout!' . NEW In Conversation with Director John Waters, Actress Kathleen Turner and Actress Mink Stole (34:27, 1080p).
Feature Commentary with John Waters and Kathleen Turner. Feature Commentary with John Waters. Serial Mom: Surreal Moments – Featuring Interviews with Waters, Stole, Actress Patricia Hearst, Actress Ricki Lake, Actor Matthew Lillard, Casting Director Pat Moran, Production Designer Vincent Peranio & More! (29:06). The Making of Serial Mom – Original Promotional Featurette (6:06, 480i). The Kings of Gore: Herschel Gordon Lewis and David Friedman Featurette (11:26). Original Theatrical Trailer (2:28).
Serial Mom is one of John Waters's finest crafted films and I'm glad that Shout! Factory has brought it to the States as a CE. I can't proclaim that it's the definitive version, however. It's too bad that it couldn't have restored the same print with the OAR that HBO struck years ago for LD and DVD. Has licensed the hilarious Waters commentary from '99, the Waters and Turner commentary recorded for the '08 DVD along with three featurettes and a trailer. It also adds a very nice discussion about Serial Mom between Waters, Turner, and Mink Stole that Shout!
Shot in 2017. Completists will want to grab a used copy of the long OOP HBO at a decent price for the proper aspect ratio, six TV spots, B-roll footage, and brief EPK interview snippets. Despite my quibbles about the framing, you should still pick up this Shout! CE in time before indulging in Waters's Female Trouble (1974), which is coming from Criterion in late June.
A HIGHLY RECOMMENDED package!
'Serial Mom' has as its central joke (and a very long-running joke it is) that Beverly Sutphin, a cheerful Baltimore housewife who makes terrific meatloaf, is a serial killer. The movie thinks it is funny to contrast this with the idealized homelife she provides (or thinks she provides) for her family, which seems to have been cloned from 'Ozzie and Harriet' and other idealized nuclear units.I am not sure why this isn't very funny, but it's not. The laughs in the movie come not from the killings or even from the mom's secret identity, but from the details of everyday life which, the writer and director, skewers with such great affection.Advertisement.
There is even something about the way he shows sunlight bathing a breakfast table that's amusing; his Sutphins look like they live in a cereal commercial. He has the look and feel of their middle-American neighborhood just right, but the movie's comic premise doesn't go anywhere with it.Beverly, the Serial Mom, is played by, a brave actress who has ventured here where several other actresses reportedly feared to tread. One thing I like about Turner is her willingness to tackle unlikely roles; her agent probably warned her against Danny DeVito's 'War of the Roses,' for example, but she and the equally fearless took that exercise in matrimonial bloodshed and made it ghoulishly effective.In 'Serial Mom,' though, it's not so much that Turner's performance doesn't succeed, as that there's something sad about it that works against the humor. All serial killers are insane (at least I hope so). But in a comedy they need to extract some sort of zeal and manic joy from their atrocities; they have to give the audience permission, for the time being, to suspend the ordinary rules of good conduct.In the slasher movies, the humor comes because the killers are seen as the victims of their programming, repeating the same obsessive behavior over and over again; we laugh because we see their mistake.
In the classic horror films, we're amused because the evil is so stylized we can't take it seriously; licks his lips and rolls his eyes and intones his pseudo-Shakespearean imprecations, and his behavior takes the edge off his actions.Watch 'Serial Mom' closely, however, and you'll realize that something is miscalculated at a fundamental level. Turner's character is helpless and unwitting in a way that makes us feel almost sorry for her - and that undermines the humor. She isn't funny crazy, she's sick crazy.
The movie shows her triggered by passing remarks (a garbage man says 'somebody ought to kill' a neighbor woman who refuses to recycle). She gets a weird light in her eyes that I guess we're supposed to laugh at, but, gee, it's kind of pathetic the way she goes into murderous action. Like ',' this is a movie where the comedy doesn't work because at some underlying level the material generates emotions we feel uneasy about.Advertisement. John Waters has, of course, been over some of this ground before; many of his films show a surface of inane suburban normality, pierced by the secret depravities of his inhabitants. After his early X-rated weirdo extravaganzas starring Divine, he scaled back to PG-land for ' (1988) and 'Cry Baby' (1990), invocations of the early 1960s and mid-1950s. Both films, like 'Serial Mom,' depend for a lot of their humor on his memories of a time when people seriously believed that cheese could come in cans.His cast this time includes (whom he discovered in 'Hairspray') as Misty Sutphin, the boy-crazy daughter who eventually begins to twig that something is wrong with mom; as Beverly's unobservant husband, and as Chip, the brother whose bad grades at school inspire his mom to run down one of his teachers with her car.
And, yes, that's Patricia Hearst in the jury box during Beverly's eventual trial (she inspires Beverly to write an urgent note to her attorney: 'Juror Number 8 is wearing white shoes after Labor Day!' ) The movie has some fun with how the family deals with their mother's serial murders (Misty sells T-shirts outside the courthouse), and of course Waters works in some movie parodies (although when Kathleen Turner spreads her legs in court in homage to, it's more awkward and uncomfortable than funny).The more I think about this film, the more interested I am in why it doesn't work. The crucial problem is that since we feel some sympathy for the Kathleen Turner character, we can't laugh at her. But underneath that, somehow, is Waters' own essential niceness.He may have directed some of the most shocking and scatological films of our time, but at some level he always expresses a tenderness for his characters, and in 'Serial Mom' he is simply not able to be cruel enough to Beverly Sutphin to make her available for our laughter.Waters seems typecast as the author of shocking suburban melodramas, but I suspect that trapped inside of him is the soul of an entirely different kind of storyteller.Advertisement.