Kathleen Turner’s Extremely R-Rated Comedy Slasher Is An Earlier, Raunchier Scream

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

If you’re a horror fan, you probably think about the genre’s mainstream entries in terms of before Scream and after it. Scream changed the game because its characters, to some degree, are aware that they’re living in a slasher film. Matthew Lillard’s Stu is a horror movie expert who knows all the tropes, tricks, and rules for survival. Ghostface always has a different motive or identity, allowing the franchise to build out its lore in increasingly convoluted ways while somehow staying grounded. Most importantly, even though the gore is top notch, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

I’m not here to talk about 1996’s Scream, though, but rather 1994’s Serial Mom, a John Waters film operating on the exact same wavelength as Wes Craven’s teen-scream masterpiece, two years before it made its rounds. I’m not saying this to call out one filmmaker for ripping off another, either. Most likely, horror by the mid-90s had reached a point where audiences were bored with straight-up slashers, while more comical entries like Dr. Giggles didn’t necessarily perform well due to being so over the top. If anything, both filmmakers were simply in the same creative headspace and wanted to make something with the edge of a slasher, but humor that leaned more satirical.

Serial Mom is violent, crude, slapstick, and even features Matthew Freakin Lillard as a horror movie expert who uses genre rules as a means to survive the slayings happening in his community. This movie is nothing like Scream from a storytelling perspective, but it’s a perfect companion piece because it occupies the same lane, but with a wildly different destination.

Kathleen Turner Overdrive

Serial Mom is exactly what it sounds like. We’re introduced to Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner), a picture-perfect Stepford wife type with a dark streak. While she seems perfectly sane on the surface (debatable, but just roll with it), she has a tendency to commit murder over perceived slights that bear absolutely no significance to her life. For example, somebody chewing gum loudly or wearing white shoes after Labor Day is enough to send her into a uncontrollable rage. She wants everything to be perfect, and when anything fails to live up to her psychotic standards, the cracks start to show.

When she’s not using magazine clippings to send inappropriate letters to one of her neighbors, Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole), she’s calling her house and screaming profanities into the phone. Her son and daughter, Misty (Ricki Lake) and Chip (Matthew Lillard), are typical suburban teenagers, but they know better than to cross their mother. Especially after Chip complains about his math teacher, only for the guy to turn up dead after Beverly confronts him during a PTA meeting.

Slowly but surely, the entire community of Towson, Maryland goes on high alert as the victim count piles up, all while Beverly goes about her day completely unperturbed. Her husband Eugene has every reason to be suspicious, but like the rest of the Sutphin family, he’s terrified of her in that specific way where everybody knows better than to acknowledge the obvious problem sitting right in front of them.

The Running Gags Are The Reason To Stick Around

What truly separates Serial Mom from Scream, though, are its running gags. For one thing, Kathleen Turner looks certifiably insane in every single scene. Every shot frames Beverly’s wholesome side from one angle and her unhinged side from another, effortlessly shifting between the two and never letting the viewer feel fully confident about when she’s going to snap next. There’s a built-in tension there, and to me, that’s the movie’s funniest recurring joke.

Misty frequently has run-ins with authority figures like Detectives Pike (Scott Wesley Morgan) and Gracey (Walt MacPherson), along with other adults who all seem weirdly hot and bothered by her mere presence even though she’s barely a teenager. They share a knowing glance, then continue the scene as if absolutely nothing strange or sexually suggestive just happened.

The sight gags range from Golden Era Simpsons-level clever to downright juvenile, and Waters is clearly playing a numbers game to see how many zingers he can cram into a 93-minute slasher comedy.

The Scream Connection

The best part about Serial Mom, however, has to be its level of self-awareness. Like Scream, it knows it’s a slasher. Matthew Lillard’s characters in both films act as the bridge between fiction and real life because they’re the ones connecting the dots on a meta level and communicating them directly to the audience. In both films, they lay out the rules of the established fiction and back them up with examples from the media they consume.

At the end of the day, Serial Mom and Scream are two totally different movies doing two totally different things. Suggesting they’re alike from a storytelling perspective would be preposterous. But they are both slashers with twisted senses of humor, and they both hinge on meta-comedy that allows for their otherwise boilerplate premises to do something fresh with the slasher subgenre.

Scream plays things more seriously and is genuinely scary whenever it decides to lean into straight horror. There’s none of that in Serial Mom, which plays more like a slapstick comedy than a traditional slasher, but has just as much fun subverting expectations in its own twisted way.

As of this writing, Serial Mom is streaming free on Tubi.