Monday, April 22, 2019

Great Moments In Movie Shelves #182

I know we were just talking about Serial Mom for its 25th anniversary last week but seeing as how it's John Waters 73rd birthday today I don't think it could hurt talking about it some more. Well as long as we rewind our videotapes when we're done, it won't hurt, anyway. Speaking of...

... scenes in 80s and 90s movies set in video-stores always make me happy but how great is the throwaway gag of putting Kathleen Turner's psycho Beverly Sutphin in front of the Death Becomes Her standee for a quick sec? Death does indeed become Bevely Sutphin.

Every time we visit the video-store that her son Chip (Matthew Lillard) works at we get a good self-reflective goof though -- the first time we're there Chip and his friends are watching Strait-Jacket, Joan Crawford's classic camp film from 1964 about, you guessed it, one axe-wielding mama. 

And when Beverly's daughter Misty (Ricki Lake) comes in to tearfully confess her suspicions about Mommy Dearest to her brother she's framed against the wall of horror movies -- I can make out Silent Night Deadly Night and Lucio Fulci's Zombie back there; can you recognize any others? Is that Die Hard?

I think it's also pretty funny that it's Matthew Lillard playing a horror movie nut who works in a video-store here, two years before he'd take a variation on this character to its extreme in Wes Craven's Scream, which just happens to have a very similar scene set in a video-store which we've covered before...

If you told me that Scream's Stu was just Chip after being put into a witness protection program I'd totally believe you. His latent biologically predestined maniac finally erupts! The Sutphin bloodline will not be tamed! Be Kind, Rewind... or else!!! 

Happy birthday, John Waters!

1 comment:

DownDownYouFool said...

One movie in the top right of the frame with Misty (and more clearly visible in the last gif of Beverly) is Shock’em Dead, starring Traci Lords, who appears briefly in Serial Mom.