Beverly Sutphin (
Kathleen Turner) is the perfect suburban housewife and mother. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide