Serial Mom

Imagine if suburban moms everywhere just...snapped. All the minutiae of daily life, the endless little grievances of maintaining a home, of being a wife and mother, of putting up with the monotony of the PTA and the neighbors and all the stale, banal conventions of middle American values, building and building until they just couldn't take it anymore. John Waters' Serial Mom (1994), starring Kathleen Turner as a Baltimore housewife, imagines for us. 

Turner plays Beverly Sutphin, whose descent into serial killing starts with a little harmless social anarchy: she's been harassing one of her neighbors (Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls (in a disguised voice). She giggles at the thought of this little secret. The police have been in the neighborhood asking questions, but nobody would ever suspect Beverly. But then, Beverly is angered by her teenage son's math teacher, who thinks he's too obsessed with horror movies and that Beverly is to blame. She backs over him with her car, and soon it seems that anyone who gets under Beverly's skin is a potential victim. Not rewinding your video before returning it to the rental store? Dead. Wearing white shoes after Labor Day? Dead. Beverly can't stop.  There are too many rule-breakers out there who evade any kind of consequences for their utter disregard for the social conventions that matter to Beverly.

Her bewildered family (husband Sam Waterson, adolescent kids Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard) doesn't know what to do, and meanwhile the police are putting two and two together, waiting until they have enough evidence to nail Beverly for six gruesome murders. (The piece de resistance is when Beverly bludgeons a woman to death with a leg of lamb while "Annie" sings "Tomorrow" on the television set.)

Serial Mom is a bit slapdash, in typical John Waters form, but it's such an audacious little slice of insanity that it's hard to be overly annoyed by its faults. This is, after all, a funny movie about social anarchy. It doesn't hold up very well as a movie (the sense of pacing is minimal, and at times you wish Waters would build things up with more restraint: Beverly is already cuckoo by the time the opening credits finish, so we don't get the pleasure of watching the progression from "normal" to "crazy.") But as a piece of satire on suburban mores, it's pretty watchable stuff, and it certainly taps into the culture's commercialization of crime and criminals. The people's obsession with Beverly and the accusations against her turns--like all American obsessions--into a capitalist endeavor by the end of the picture. She's a celebrity, and Suzanne Somers (who makes a brief appearance) is vying to play her in a TV-movie. And her daughter is even selling shirts and pins with the emblem "Serial Mom" emblazoned on them. Meanwhile, Beverly agrees to act as her own attorney (Charles Manson/Ted Bundy style), and it's fun to watch all the little surprises she has up her sleeve, geared toward winning over the jury.

With Scott Morgan, Walt MacPherson, Justin Whalin, Patricia Dunnock, and Mary Jo Catlett. Written by John Waters. 95 min. ★★½

Side Effects

Spoiler-Free Mini-Review

Side Effects is a creepy little thriller about a prescription drug called Ablixa, and one patient (Rooney Mara) who begins exhibiting disturbing side effects after this drug is prescribed to her by her doctor (Jude Law). She's trying to start a new life with her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), who's just been released from prison after serving time for insider trading (apparently he did not learn from Martha Stewart's mistakes). But soon after he's released, his fragile wife becomes inexplicably depressed, even suicidal. What happens after all this will be revealed in the spoiler zone. Suffice to say, Side Effects is enjoyable and worth seeing. It exceeded my expectations, and Jude Law carried the film remarkably well, with help from Mara, who's becoming an expert at playing characters who suffer immense emotional trauma (from being Mark Zuckerberg's spurned ex in The Social Network to playing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). 

Spoiler Zone

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT??? This movie is crazy. It starts off as your typical dreary paranoid conspiracy thriller-shocker-not-ready-for-Lifetime-TV movie, and then whips out some plot twists that I had no idea would emerge. Perhaps I'm just a gullible movie-watcher, and everyone else saw this coming? 

Two things made Side Effects infinitely better for me: 1) the fact that Rooney Mara's character was secretly working with her ex-psychiatrist, Catherine Zeta-Jones, to fool everyone; and 2) the fact that Channing Tatum's character was killed off relatively quickly. Is it bad that I perked up after Mr. Tatum exited the stage? (Director Steven Soderbergh apparently has a huge man-crush on Magic Mike. Tatum isn't horrendous, but it's certainly hard to believe that he was ever guilty of insider trading. Maybe of disturbing the peace or pirating Eminem CDs.)

Also, seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones play a villain is so much fun. She has an iciness to her that's never fully been exploited until now. Instead, filmmakers have played up that exotic look, ever since The Mask of Zorro. (Actresses who are difficult to ethnically label have always had this blessing-curse. Except Myrna Loy, who is not difficult to label, but still experienced this typecasting. She's very obviously white, but in the 1930s her slanted eyes were enough to justify casting her as the Snake Goddess or some other exotic sexy villainness.) 

In fact, if it wasn't for the plot twists, Side Effects would be a generally unwatchable movie. It's a depressing premise: a girl exhibits dangerous tendencies after taking a new anti-depressant, and then subsequently stabs her husband to death. We're all again wondering why this movie seems to resemble that Oxygen marathon we accidentally DVR'd last weekend. But after the twist, Side Effects becomes a fascinating little thriller, with Jude Law donning his private detective hat as he tries to figure out who to blame. (His career, his family, and his freedom are on the line since he prescribed the drug that caused his patient to go berserk-o.) Law is someone I enjoy watching because he's got that plucky British attitude: he's smart and in command, and it's a lot of fun watching him square off with Catherine Zeta-Jones, who's vulnerable because of her unexpected attraction to Rooney Mara.

Vinessa Shaw appears as Law's wife. She's the typical movie wife: not an ounce of understanding in her body, but they're able to patch things up in the end, Hollywood style (i.e. without anything more than a segue to him picking their kid up from school while she waits in the car smiling and happy music plays overhead). With Polly Draper and David Costabile. Written by Scott Z. Burns. 106 minutes. 2013. ★★

The Lost Boys

An 80s cocktail, with vampires, The Lost Boys is something of a classic for those of us who grew up with it. Although, like The Goonies, it might be less enjoyable when viewed without nostalgic graciousness. It has a lot of fresh-faced young actors whose careers rose and fell in the coming years: Jason Patric and Corey Haim as two brothers who move to Santa Carla, California, with their recently divorced mom (Dianne Wiest); Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander as two Santa Carla brothers who work in their parents' comic book store; and Kiefer Sutherland, as the head of a quartet of punk-vampires who live in the ruins of a hotel that sank into the earth during the great quake of 1906. The vampire buddies spend their nights at Santa Carla's main hangout: an amusement park located right on the beach.

The tagline of The Lost Boys is "sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die: it's fun to be a vampire." This is a vampire film for the MTV generation. (And these vampires do have a lot more "fun" than recent cinema's exploits into the genre. There's no policy about avoiding human prey. No kidding themselves about living in community with the not-undead. These vampires are evil, and happy about it.) Unfortunately, The Lost Boys isn't thoughtful enough to explore its own theme--the allure of eternal youth--with any finesse. This isn't a critique of youth culture or its excesses. Neither is it a celebration of youthful impressionism or recklessness. Instead, The Lost Boys, like so many other films, is an unashamed studio product, one that wants to cash in on young moviegoers. It's exploitative in that way. We're getting very mainstream vampirism here.

Lucky for us, this mainstreaming of the vampire legend works for the most part, because The Lost Boys, for all its cookie cutter edges, is still a fun, energetic movie at heart, full of witty, likable verve from its cast. It has a smartass sense of humor, punctuated by Haim's performance. His character is always ready with a well-delivered quip, usually directed at his older brother, Michael (Patric). Patric is the impressionable one, seeking approval and friendship in a new town, and willing to do anything to get it. He's sucked into the vampires' world, and it's hard not to see a comparison to the drug culture being made. In the ruins of the lost boys' lair is a large photo of Jim Morrison: iconic, surprisingly apropos. He's their idol, their inspiration.

The studio executives behind The Lost Boys were going for a hit, and nothing more, probably in response to the success of 1985's Fright Night, which was cheaply made and grossed 24,000,000 dollars. The Lost Boys made something over 30 million, and these two films ushered in another cycle of vampire-themed comic-horror films that also included Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (released a couple months after Lost Boys), and culminated in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bram Stoker's Dracula (both 1992). These movies--or more specifically, their financial success at the box office and the relative cheapness for which they can generally be made--do a lot to explain the popular culture's fascination with vampires in the last 30 years, though of course they don't explain all of it.

The allure of this sub-genre is also present in Kiefer Sutherland's performance: he's a magnetic actor, and a magnetic vampire; he's almost a cult leader, if you will, and he gets Michael to do just about anything--even literally jump off a bridge--in his quest to convert him into a bloodsucker. Then there's the Frogg brothers (Feldman and Newlander), whose dead-serious sincerity (they give Haim's character a vampire comic and assure him that it should be read like a survival manual rather than entertainment) makes The Lost Boys funny. And that's why I still enjoyed watching it tonight, after many viewings. It's the kind of horror movie you're allowed to laugh at. It never takes itself too seriously. (Although it has a few moments of excess, including some over-the-top special effects characteristic of 80s horror movies.)

Dianne Wiest is appropriately motherly (although not nearly as memorable as she would be in Bullets Over Broadway) in a mom role for which the spunky Dee Wallace (E.T., The Howling, Cujo) would have been perfect. With Barnard Hughes as the crusty old grandfather with a sharp sense of humor; Edward Herrmann as the mom's love interest, Max; Jami Gertz as Star, Michael's love interest, a half-vampire with a heart of gold; and Brooke McCarter, Alex Winter, and Billy Wirth as members of Sutherland's band of teenage nosferatus. Directed by Joel Schumacher. 97 min. 1987 ★★★