John Waters brings his distinctive (alternative, subversive, authentically liberal) voice to bear on a constellation of topics close to his heart: true crime, the tabloid press, TV docudramas, instant celebrity, fandom, the whole indistinguishable blur. His own response to the pageant seems plain enough: irony overpowered by relish. Or better, relish intensified by irony. Not a PC response, but an unguarded, uncensored, unsanctimonious one. A personal and a peculiar and a shamelessly shared one. His mixed feelings naturally produce some garbled messages: the conformist middle-class housewife does double duty as the standard-bearer of the deviant and the defiant. And why not? If Betty Broderick and Aileen Wuornos can be made into "feminist" heroines, why not our Beverly Sutphin? The offenses that set off this serial killer's alarm are many and varied and very funny: failure to recycle, failure to rewind a rented video, failure to wear a seat belt, the fashion faux pas of white shoes after Labor Day. Through her, Waters exposes that part of all of us that goes through life as judge and jury of everyone around us. Except he adds executioner to the judicial process. And here again we run into one of his garbled messages: he pleads tolerance for the intolerant. His sense of humor is no more trustworthy than his just plain sense. Nor less. As often as he hits a cultural nerve (or close to it), he hits a collective funny bone. And without question he has the proper tools for it: an ear for cliché ("I must warn you," intones the police detective before disclosing a poison-pen letter. "This note contains -- language"), a nose for the inappropriate (the daughter's first reaction to her mother's newfound notoriety: "Now I'll never get a boyfriend"), an eye for the incongruous (a big bruiser munching on a skewer of meat enters the men's room and, on spying a dead body, lets out the kind of scream traditionally reserved for the opposite sex: liberalism in action). He also, for the first time, has a leading player of the magnitude of Kathleen Turner, lording it over a typically eclectic cast including Sam Waterston, Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, Patty Hearst, and Suzanne Somers (as "herself"). (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.