MOVIES ABOUT MURDER AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PART 2
Since the FBI started studying serial murderers in the 1970s, the number of films about them multiplied to the point that these days they’re readily available on television stations and streaming services. Because Part 1 of this series was about child perpetrators and victims, in Part 2 I focus on movies about adults. I originally considered using movies with male perpetrators because most violent offenders are men, a view that the majority of films in the nineties supported. Further, the plots often showed white men preying on white women because in 1990 the Department of Justice reported that over eighty percent of serial murderers were white male sadists who compulsively acted out their sexual fantasies on hapless females, which tended to also be white. Current data disputes that definition, however, so at the end of this entry I will discuss some newer perspectives.
After
determining the opinions that prevailed about serial murder in the 1990s, I
consulted websites that had lists of the best serial killer movies overall and
found that most included the same foreign and domestic films. Even though it
was known by the 1980s that numerous serial killers, including John Wayne Gacy
and Jeffrey Dahmer, targeted males, over eighty percent of the movies cast
females as the victims. However, there weren’t many films that portrayed women
as the perpetrators. Of those, Monster (2003), which was a docudrama
about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, treated the phenomenon seriously, but the
others, of which there were few, were primarily black comedies. This led me to
wonder whether this meant the film industry found the idea of a female serial
killer ridiculous to the point of being laughable. It was as if they thought people
shouldn’t take women who kill seriously.
One such movie
that appeared in all the lists was Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Directed
by Academy Award winner Frank Capra, whose name is generally associated with
movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night (which
won the Oscar for all five of the top awards), and Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, and who worked with A list actors like Clark Gable, Jimmy
Steward, Spencer Tracy, Loretta Young, Donna Reed, and Jean Harlow, the subject
was atypical. In this story, protagonist Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant)
discovers a dead body in his elderly aunts’ window seat and eventually learns
that the “harmless” women have been poisoning their gentlemen boarders for
years. In other words, it’s a funny movie about a very troubling subject. An
equally concerning film is Serial Mom, my first pick for this post.
Serial Mom 1994
Aside from
playing Nola Aldrich for a year on the soap opera The Doctors, Kathleen
Turner was a stage actress until 1981 when she moved to the big screen and hit
the ground running in her portrayal of Matty Walker in the film noir Body
Heat. Her performance was so impressive that BAFTA and the Golden Globes nominated
her for awards. Although she proved talented in the drama genre, she next
appeared in two comedies portraying Dolores Benedict opposite Steve Martin in The
Man With Two Brains (1983) and then starring with Michael Douglas and Danny
DeVito as Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone (1984). In the latter film,
she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy. Ms. Turner continued to
demonstrate a wide range of acting abilities by appearing in films like Peggy
Sue Got Married (1986) for which the Academy nominated her for an Oscar and
as the voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988-uncredited). In 1989, she once again appeared alongside Michael Douglas
in the challenging role of Barbara Rose in The War of the Roses
(1989), and from there she took on the starring role of Beverly Sutphin in the
film Serial Mom.
Like many movies
about true crime, Serial Mom opens with a declaration that the plot is
based on a true story. From there, a heavenly blue background containing the
names of the writer, director, and principal actors scrolls past before finally
zooming in on a large two-story house with an immaculate lawn. Inside Beverly
Sutphin, as perfectly coifed and demurely dressed as Donna Stone on The
Donna Reed Show, serves her too trusting husband Eugene (Sam Waterston) and
none too bright children, Chip (Matthew Lillard who you might remember from Scream)
and Misty (Ricky Lake) a nutritious breakfast with a side of social etiquette.
Her advice for Chip is to keep his grades up, so he can go to college, and for
Misty to not rush to find a boyfriend. In direct contradiction to these edicts,
however, Beverly seems unfazed by her son’s obsession with horror movies and
her daughter’s outrageous proclivity to flirt with anyone in pants.
Just as the
family is finishing breakfast, a couple of cops arrive to ask questions
regarding a series of harassing phone calls and a filthy letter that neighbor
Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole) blames on Beverly. Unfortunately for the terrified
Dottie, when the Sutphins respond that the woman’s a nutcase, the officers
believe them. Beverly, who the men regard as “the nicest person you could ever
meet” blatantly scoffs that her neighbor is delusional, and Eugene backs his
wife up by declaring that no woman would write words as nasty as those contained
in the note. Then everyone leaves and once Beverly has the house to herself,
she charges upstairs to her bedroom and calls Dottie, spouting language that
most men wouldn’t utter. However, the police are not the only people who fall
for Beverly’s tricks. Her husband seems completely fooled by her duplicitous
behavior when she kneels to say her evening prayers before crawling into bed
and resuming the book she’s reading about Charles Manson. He is equally
clueless that Richard Speck is her pen pal and that she has a recording that
Ted Bundy made for her before he died in the electric chair.
Like any
“responsible” mother, Beverly judges the people who are around her children,
especially the ones who break rules. For instance, she dislikes Chip’s best
friend Scotty (Justin Whalin) because the boy won’t wear his seat belt and
worries about Misty’s friend (crush) Carl (Lonnie Horsey) because he could take
her daughter’s virginity. She also keeps an eye on the kids’ teachers by
religiously attending parent-teacher conferences, meting out appropriate
punishments when they’re called for. For example, when Chip’s math instructor
Mr. Stubbins (John Badila) complains that Chip draws gory pictures in class,
then goes on to blame the boy’s disrespectful behavior on his home life,
Beverly retaliates by running over him with her car.
Enjoying the
satisfaction she experiences from conducting that first murder, Beverly begins
to kill anyone she has a problem with. For instance, she kills Carl for
standing Misty up, dispatches Mr. Ralph Sterner (Doug Roberts) and his wife
Betty (Kathy Fannon) for making Eugene, who is a dentist, come into the office
on a Sunday, punishes Emmy Lou Jenson (Patsy Grady Abrams) for refusing to
rewind her tapes before returning them to the video store where Chip works, and
immolates Scotty for all his bad behaviors. Forced to acknowledge that Beverly
has a problem, Eugene and the kids start following her around town to prevent
her from killing anyone else. At the same time, to protect the community in
general, law enforcement asks the media to warn people that Beverly is
dangerous and not to approach her. Rather than issuing an alert, however,
members of the press turn her into a celebrity by giving her the moniker Serial
Mom.
Eventually, the
police manage to match Beverly’s fingerprints to those left at a crime scene
and arrest her. When the trial starts, excited crowds gather outside the
courthouse, spouting their declarations of admiration for her while her kids,
basking in the glow of their mother’s infamy, sell T-Shirts with her picture on
the front. In response to the media’s attention, the prosecuting attorney
preens in front of the cameras, certain that he’ll win without trouble. Then
the judge allows Beverly to fire her attorney and represent herself, turning
the case on its head. Using lies and deceit, she outsmarts the prosecutor,
audience, and jury at every turn. Suzanne Somers even shows up to announce that
she’ll be playing Beverly in the made-for-TV Serial Mom movie. At trial’s end,
members of the jury deliberate, and, to the district attorney’s disbelief, find
Beverly ‘Not Guilty.’ As the gallery cheers, Eugene, Chip, and Misty look on in
horror, realizing she’s coming back home to live with them. Everyone pours outside,
leaving Beverly, who has been stewing from the beginning that one of the jurors
wears white shoes after Labor Day, to follow the woman into the bathroom and
teach her a terminal lesson in fashion.
Summary
Could this
ridiculous plot be based on a true story, as the opening credits state? Well,
in 1991, a thirty-seven-year-old mother in Houston, Texas named Wanda Holloway,
whom the media named the Pom-Pom Mom, went on trial for attempting to hire a
hitman to murder Verna Heath. Cheerleading hopeful Shanna Holloway, Wanda’s
daughter had repeatedly lost to Verna’s daughter, Amber. Wanda thought that if
Amber’s mother died, she would be too distraught to continue cheering.
Fortunately, when Wanda tried to convince ex brother-in-law Terry Harper to
help her hire a hit man, he taped their conversations and turned them over to
the police, instead. Needless to say, the police arrested her, put her on
trial, and the jury found her guilty, but Wanda’s attorney appealed the
conviction, and got it overturned. Rather than face the ordeal again, Wanda
pleaded guilty and received a ten-year sentence, of which she served six
months. Two made for TV movies aired this preposterous story Willing to
Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story (1992) and The Positively True
Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader Mom (1993). Thus, it seems to
me that Serial Mom could be based on a true story, that of the Pom-Pom
Mom, which also features a woman who thinks it is okay for a mother to support
her loved ones any way she sees fit.
So, I Married An Axe Murderer – 1993
Before he began making movies, Mike Meyers was best known in the
United States for his work on Saturday Night Live. Before that, he had
only performed in two short-lived shows on Canadian television, Range Ryder,
and the Calgary Kid when he was fourteen, and It’s Only Rock and
Roll which aired for a few weeks in the summer of 1987. That was enough for
him to hone his craft, however, because he appeared as a regular on SNL for six
years. During that time, he imitated a plethora of well-known personages and
invented over fifteen separate characters, including Wayne Campbell, the
protagonist in SNL’s film Wayne’s World (1992) where he and his sidekick
Garth (Dana Carvey) rock out to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Enjoying newfound
fame, he moved on to his next project, So I Married An Axe Murderer, a
curious film that features Mike as both Charlie McKenzie and his eccentric
father Stuart.
The story takes place in San Francisco’s Little Italy, the
birthplace of the beatniks, in a bistro named Café Roads which is reminiscent
of the Caffe Triste Coffee House where the original performance artists
appeared. As the song “There She Goes” plays in the background, the film opens
on a packed house, with the crowd imbibing gargantuan cups of Cappuccino.
Charlie (Mike Meyers), an assistant manager at the City Lights Bookstore, made
famous by Jack Kerouac’s book On The Road, is talking to his best friend
Tony Giardino (Anthony LaPaglia), a struggling-to-be-taken-seriously undercover
cop. The topic of conversation is Charlie’s decision to break up with his
latest girlfriend, Sherry. When Tony says he thought Sherry was nice, Charlie
defends this breakup as well as others, stating that not only was Sherry “a
thief”, but the girl before her was “in the Mafia”, and the girl prior to that
“smelled like beef vegetable soup” (a characterization that will pop up again
in the 2007 movie Juno, when Paulie Bleeker tells Juno he can’t date
Katrina DeVoort because she “smells like soup.”).
During his turn at the mic, Charlie recites his signature poem,
which opens with the line, “Woman-Woe man.” He goes on to list the faults of
all his former girlfriends, emphasizing significant phrases with arm gestures.
At the end, he picks up a burning candle and blows it out. After he finishes
the performance, Charlie walks out the door, and drives away in a faded VW
Karmann Ghia. The next day, when he’s on the way to his parent’s house, he
passes a butcher shop and notices a lovely woman working inside. Although his
relationships invariably fail, Charlie’s a romantic at heart, so he parks and
goes into the shop pretending to be looking for haggis, a Scottish dish he
considers too disgusting for the store to carry it. To his dismay, the woman
does have it, and while she’s ringing up his purchase, Charlie asks her name,
and she answers, Harriett (Nancy Travis). The next day, Charlie gives the dish
to his Scottish-born parents, Stuart (Mike Meyers dressed as an older man and
speaking in a brogue that sounds a lot like Shrek) and May (Brenda Fricker, who
is actually Irish), who are none too happy to get it.
As is typical of Meyer’s movies, most of the characters are odd,
including Charlie’s parents, who display characteristics that clearly have lent
themselves to their son’s paranoia. For instance, Stuart believes that Colonel
Sanders spikes his spices with drugs to make people crave the chicken and May
gets her current events from the Weekly World News (think National
Inquirer) it tells stories that other papers don’t, (like the one about
a man who gave birth). Although Charlie scoffs that the rag isn’t legit, he
can’t resist reading an article about an axe murdering bride who killed all
three of her grooms, a lounge singer, a Russian Martial Arts Expert, and a man
named Ralph. The story stirs up Charlie’s ever-present fear that women are out
to get him, and he starts to worry that he’ll somehow encounter this black
widow and become her fourth victim.
Under the circumstances, you would think this would stop him from
pursuing a new relationship, but no, Charlie is smitten with Harriett, and
cannot deny his attraction. Instead, he goes back to the butcher shop in hopes
of winning her over. Since she doesn’t have any employees, Charlie, who knows
how to work with meat because his father is a butcher, offers to help out. They
have so much fun working together, that when she closes for the night, he asks
her out to dinner. He is optimistic that this will be the start of something
great, but problems arise almost immediately. After their meal, Charlie and
Harriett go for a stroll and encounter two Sailors who are speaking in Russian
(Ilya Bodski, Eugene Buick). To his horror, Harriett is fluent in the difficult
language and converses with them. Nevertheless, when they get to her apartment,
she invites him inside, and he accepts. Charlie immediately notices that she’s
decorated the living area with artifacts from around the world, but when he
comments on the multifaceted collection, Harriett simply states that she’s
“moved a lot.” Though feeling discomfited, Charlie has sex with her and
afterward, rolls over and falls asleep. Suddenly, Harriet wakes him up crying
out the name “Ralph.” Assuming that she’s having a bad dream, he wakes her up,
and once she’s settled down, asks who Ralph is. She evasively replies that it's
just a friend.
Even though he can’t deny that some odd events have been
happening, Charlie really likes Harriett, so he rolls over and goes back to
sleep. However, when he awakens in the morning, she’s not beside him. He wanders
through the apartment searching for her, hears water running, and following the
sound into the bathroom, sees her silhouette behind the shower curtain.
Thinking he’ll join her, he pulls it back only to encounter Rose (Amanda
Plummer), who says she’s Harriett’s sister. His first inclination is to
apologize, then recognizing that this as an opportunity to learn more about his
new love interest, he starts asking questions. To his consternation, Rose is so
harebrained that she’s impossible to understand, and he only learns that the
apartment is actually hers and Harriett just stays there. While they’re
talking, Harriet returns and after giving Charlie a dark look, tells Rose to
fix him breakfast, and leaves for work.
By this point, Charlie can’t deny that Harriett and Mrs. X have
some striking similarities: they both speak Russian, relocate a lot, and know
someone named Ralph. Then two even more suspicious things happen. The first
takes place when they’re watching a romantic movie and Harriett comments that
what she really wants is to be with someone forever (as in married?); the other
occurs at his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary, when she gets up and
sings “Only You,” which is known to be Mrs. X’s favorite song. Unable to stand
not knowing whether his girlfriend is likely to murder him, Charlie asks Tony
to look into the Mrs. X case. Then, rather than waiting to hear his friend’s
findings, he tells Harriett he wants to break up. He walks away convinced that
he did the right thing, but when he performs the “Woe Man” poem about her, he
cannot blow out the candle. That turns out to be for the best because Tony
informs him that a woman came into the station and confessed to killing Ralph,
meaning that Harriett is not Mrs. X. Relieved, Charlie rushes to her apartment
and apologizes, but now she rejects him, stating that he’ll just “do it again.”
Unable to stand losing her, Charlie woos her with a special version of his
poem, and she his performance touches her so deeply, she takes him back.
They decide to get married and, after a rushed ceremony, leave to
spend their honeymoon in a remote hotel in the mountains. Right after they
leave, Tony learns that the woman who confessed to killing Ralph is a crank,
not the murderer. Even though a massive storm is brewing, Tony hires a pilot
(Steven Wright) to fly him to the resort to save his friend. Unfortunately, the
weather forces the pilot to land miles from the resort, and time being of the
essence, Tony finds a phone and calls the hotel to speak with Charlie. While
they’re talking, the storm first knocks out the phone, then disables the
electricity. When Charlie hangs up and turns around, a bright flash of a
lightning bolt exposes an image of an axe embedded in a log. Before he can
investigate, Harriett rushes to explain that she’s actually been married to
multiple men, who all died during their honeymoons. Terrified that he’s going
to become one more victim, Charlie pushes her into a closet and locks the door.
As another intense flash of lightning illuminates the room, he spies Rose
holding the axe and glaring at him maliciously. She confesses that she killed
Harriett’s husbands because they all tried to take Harriett away from her, then
charges after Charlie, who dives out the window and escapes onto the roof. The
ending is exciting, so rather than revealing what happens, I’ll let you watch
it for yourself.
Summary
So I Married an Axe Murderer is hardly worthy of an Academy Award,
but nevertheless it is a fun movie with quite some familiar faces. Among these
are Phil Hartman as Ranger John “Vicky” Johnson, Charles Grodin as the
Commandeered Driver, Patrick Bristow as a Café Roads performer, and Debi Mazar
as Susan. There is little reason to contrast Harriett with Beverly except to
comment that Harriett is her opposite. While Beverly clings to the past,
Harriett lives in the present. She is a likeable fun-loving person who supports
herself with her own business, dresses contemporarily, has waited to have
children, and has traveled extensively. On the other hand, although only a few
years older than Harriett, Beverly mimics the housewives of 50s TV shows,
adheres to innocuous social norms, takes sole responsibility for the children,
depends on her husband Eugene to support her, and oh, yes, kills people.
Thus, a better comparison is between Beverly and Rose because even
though the two look entirely different, they share characteristics, most
notably both being unapologetic killers while successfully appearing innocent.
Beverly publicly adheres to the social expectations of a genteel lady while
secretly violating every law in the books. Rose publicly acts silly and
childlike, while secretly boiling over with eccentricities that put every man
her sister meets at risk. In fact, at their cores, attainment of power
motivates both women. Beverly kills those who thwart her rules to control not
only her family, but everyone within her grasp. Likewise, Rose kills the men
Harriet marries to keep her sister dependent on her.
Eugene and Charlie are very intriguing to contrast as well.
Although financially successful, Eugene is almost intentionally inept. He lets
the Sterners bully him into working on his day off, has shallow relationships
with his children, and agrees with his wife’s opinions without bothering to
weight their veracity. Charlie, on the other hand, is a loser, a writer with
one terrible poem, a goof off that seldom goes to his dead-end job, and a
beatnik wannabe who hangs out in a café that became outmoded fifty years
earlier. Thus, on the surface, while these men seem different, they are alike
in that they both tip toe around rather than deal with the women in their
lives. Eugene avoids acknowledging his wife’s sketchy behavior by pretending
not to notice it. Charlie avoids becoming entangled in a relationship by
finding nonexistent deficiencies in every woman he dates. Thus, they are
cowards who lack the fortitude to stand up for themselves or others.
Conclusion
In the Twenty First Century, the FBI started to challenge its
definition of what comprises a serial killer. They began by trying to clarify
terms like ‘cooling-off period’ and ‘number of victims’ and looked more closely
at assumptions about the traits of both perpetrators and victims. Originally,
the FBI defined a typical serial killer as a white non-Hispanic male in his
twenties to thirties who murders white non-Hispanic females and doesn’t stop
killing until the police catch him or he dies. Their data, however, has suggested
ways to improve on this characterization. Citing cases like those of Wayne
Williams and Lonnie Franklin (Grim Reaper), who are both black, researchers now
believe that perpetrators and victims can be members of any race. Dealing with
cases like those of Carl Eugene Watts’ (The Sunday Morning Slasher), a black
man, and Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker), a Hispanic, both of whom
victimized whites, Hispanics, blacks, and Asians, taught investigators that
serial killers didn’t necessarily choose victims based on a specific race.
Finally, from the Dennis Rader (BTK) and Joseph DeAngelo (Golden State Killer)
cases, they came to accept that serials can and do become inactive outside of
prison.
At a recent symposium on Serial Murder, using data they’d
collected over decades, the FBI removed sex, race, cooling-off period, and age
as variables, which left the term “Serial Murder” with a much less restrictive
definition: “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same
offender(s), in separate events.” The agency still believes that most of the
perpetrators are male, primarily because the data demonstrate that men commit
approximately eighty-eight percent of all murders. However, the agency also
cautions that those numbers aren’t necessarily accurate because our society undercounts
female serial killers. Females tend to use “quiet” methods, including using
poison, killing in the privacy of their homes, and choosing family members as
victims. While investigators originally thought that sex was the primary
motivator, they have encountered enough cases where the acts were the results
of anger, a craving for attention, or the oldest reason in the book, financial
gain, to note that serial murder is not necessarily always sexual, especially
in the case of women.
As a sociologist and a feminist, I want to talk a little more
about the role of women in serial murder. When it comes to victimization, it is
not surprising that law enforcement saw victims that were women or girls because
our society tends to keep a lot closer eye on females than it does on males.
Thus, people are more likely to report them missing and the police are more
likely to take their disappearances seriously. A caution here is that being
members of marginal populations, which includes being non-white, working as prostitutes,
or using drugs, reduces the likelihood that law enforcement will aggressively investigate
their deaths or disappearances. Likewise, there is a lot of uncertainty about
the number of female perpetrators not only because they kill “silently,” but
don’t become suspects simply because they are women. The same cause could tie
these two phenomena together, socialization. Although research has shown minor
difference between boys and girls in infancy, people interpret their emotions
differently, by seeing boys as being angry but girls as being unhappy. Females
also generally turn out more passive than males because parents and society encourage
them to be nurturing, friendly, and kind, in other words, “safe” while discouraging
them from being aggressive. This not only makes them easy to victimize, but it
also causes the police unlikely to consider them lethal.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/just-deadly-inside-mind-female-serial-killer/
On IMDB, Serial Mom and So I Married an Axe Murderer have
similar ratings, 68% favorable for the former and 64% for the latter. Rating for
Serial Mom on Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, vary significantly between
critics, 63%, and the public, 72%. Thus, if you’re wondering whether to give
the film a shot, you need to decide if you're more of a critic or a fan. So
I Married an Axe Murderer rated pretty low on Rotten Tomatoes, at 53% and
68% respectively. In this case, you might want to ask yourself whether you like
the Meyer's humor, since this movie is his fare from start to finish.
Right now, Serial Mom isn’t streaming free anywhere, but you can
rent it on VUDU, Amazon, or Red Box for $4. If you want to buy it, the DVD is
around $7, but if you are one of those people who has to have Blu Ray be
prepared to pay $20 or more. So I Married An Axe Murderer is also going
to cost some bucks unless you have HBO Max because it isn’t streaming for free
anywhere. It isn’t cheap, either. The DVD is $14 on sites like Amazon, which
doesn’t even have the blu ray version. Several eBay sellers offer the movie for
some pretty decent prices used, however, so you could try there.
I haven’t decided on
the topic for my next post, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do. For now, the
weather’s warming up, so turn off your TV and go for a walk, a run, or do
whatever you like to do. And on that noted, I’m outtie.
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