Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Serial Mom Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson April 17, 2018

When 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. 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.

Serial Mom Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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! discs. 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. Shout!'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!)

Serial Mom Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout! 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!'s menu.

Serial Mom Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• 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 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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. Shout! 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!