Review of Serial Mom, directed by John Waters

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

About a year ago (at the time of typing this) I quit my job as a professional film critic to explore what was out there in the world when it came to publishing about the movies and books I wanted to see, not just what was popular in the moment. Digital media and working within it can be fun and all, but it can be grinding when you’re just chasing after all the latest trends and clicks for SEO.

I started this blog four years ago, during the pandemic, but never really took it seriously beyond the occasional post here and there about what I was up to. In 2023 I began to realize the impact this blog was having on me, and other people were reaching out about reading it, so I expanded. Once I quit my job, I decided to focus on the blog more while job hunting, as I do make a few pennies here and there from the display ads on the screen.

During my time job hunting, in-between applying to jobs here and there, it happened to coincide with an economic crisis worldwide, which meant I had even more extended time applying to jobs. Because I had all of this newfound free time, I decided to catch up on all of the movies and television shows I’ve been wanting to get to throughout the years, but never felt like I had the free time to get to them.

John Waters is one of those directors that I’ve been meaning to truly get to for the longest time. If feels like a crime to have no watched his work at this point, especially as someone born and raised in Baltimore. I’ve even read Cookie Mueller’s work because she was from Baltimore, but was somehow avoiding John.

Anyways, I did end up watching Serial Mom while I still had a Criterion subscription because of the guilt I felt from not having seen his work. With all of this intro context done, let’s get into the review!

An upper-middle-class Towson mother finds herself offing her enemies one by one.

Our main character in this movie, and the Serial Mom herself, is Beverly. She lives in Towson, which already puts her in the upper-middle-class bracket (it still is that way today), and seemingly has the perfect kids, house, and life. There’s just one little flaw about her: if anyone does anything she disagrees with, no matter how small or stupid it is, she kills them.

The ball gets rolling on catching her when the police show up at their door during breakfast. Two detectives, Pike and Gracey, are investigating the harassment of their neighbor Dottie. Of course it’s Beverly doing it, and some of the stuff she says is incredible terrible and out there for someone of her social class in the nineties. She started doing this when Dottie took a parking space from her.

But for now, she evades the questioning and suspicion. On that same day though, she runs over her kid’s math teacher in the parking lot. He specifically was condemning her son’s interest in horror movies at a PTA meeting, and Beverly didn’t like just anyone insulting her son. That night she kills her daughter’s crush, as he stood her up.

At the same time, her husband finds serial killer merch underneath their mattress and realizes something is up. Not just anyone has recordings of Ted Bundy under their mattress, and one of her son’s friends even suspects Beverly of killing people.

She leaves the dinner table and her family realizes that the suspicion is probably true. They think she’s going to kill the friend, Scotty, and run to his house. Instead, her victims of the night are a couple who asked her husband to treat them, forcing him to skip out on their birdwatching date. She kills them as Scotty is caught watching a porn film by everyone else.

Regardless, she is named the prime suspect in the murders. They go to church the next morning, and when she sneezes, everyone tries to run away in fear. The cops show up to arrest Beverly then, and she flees into the panicking crowd undetected. She goes to her son’s job at the video store, then kills one of his regular customers.

Scotty watches this happen in real time, and she chases him all the way into a rock concert, where she manages to burn him to death as the rest of the family arrives. Beverly’s case blows up across the country, especially when she expertly defends herself and points out the holes in the testimonies. An actress also shows up, creating a frenzy, as she has just been cast as Beverly in a movie.

Beverly is determined to not be guilty, but then she murders a juror outside for wearing white shoes outside. When the body is found, the movie ends with an implication that Beverly was finally put behind bars for her actions.

Overall Thoughts

This is a black comedy that’s right up my alley, that’s for sure. I found myself laughing out loud quite a bit throughout, which is rare from a movie. It definitely turned me into a John Waters fan because of how he implemented the comedy throughout the story, and I wanted to watch the rest of his filmography after seeing this movie.

Regardless, this felt like such a Towson coded movie as someone who grew up around there (although we didn’t have enough money to actually live in the direct Towson area), went to an arts high school there, and ended up at Towson University for my master’s degree. Waters is definitely a Baltimore area filmmaker.

I say go watch this one if it sounds like your kind of humor and story. I definitely had a good time with it, so if you have a darker sense of humor, this is your movie.

Follow me below on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd below.