Serial Mom

Beverly Sutphin appears to be the ideal suburban housewife in Baltimore, devoted to her dentist husband Eugene and their two children, Chip and Misty. Behind the polished surface, she is fixated on serial killers and has a rigid sense of how people should behave. When anyone she feels has slighted her family or broken her rules of proper conduct crosses her path, she responds with violence, leaving neighbors and acquaintances dead under strange circumstances.

John Waters wrote and directed the film, his ninth feature and the one that followed Cry-Baby in 1990 and preceded Pecker in 1998. Kathleen Turner plays Beverly, with Sam Waterston as her husband, Ricki Lake as Misty, Matthew Lillard as Chip, and Scott Morgan and Walt MacPherson as the detectives. It was produced by Mark Tarlov and John Fiedler for Savoy Pictures and Polar Entertainment, with a budget of 13 million USD and a worldwide box office of about 8 million USD.

Audience response has been moderately positive: on IMDb it holds 6.8/10 from 31,991 votes, and on TMDB 6.7/10 from 789 votes. A critics' rating of 5.8/10 from 56 reviews places it somewhat below those viewer scores. The film runs 94 minutes and mixes comedy with crime.