John Waters as the "Groom Reaper" courtesy Court TV
Yes, it's hoaky. Yes, it's camp. Yes, the acting is bad, the hair is big, and there's not an intelligent script line within a mile. But the magnificent John Waters swoops in to save us all in this fictionalized series that looks at just how wrong love can go. He's Court TV's knight in pencil mustache.
The series uses dramatizations of supposedly true stories to show how fast marital love can turn to murderous hate. Each episode begins with a vignette of the happy couple madly in love, usually in some wildly passionate soft-porn embrace. Then trouble comes — in the form of sleazy lawyers, bad prenups, lesbian stalkers, insurance fraud or arguments about the merits of Wayne Newton versus hip-hop. But whatever the particular undoing of each couple, one thing's for sure: There'll be plenty of suspense, plenty of malevolent plotting, plenty of trashy workplace canoodling, and at least one pair of leather pants. And that's not even counting the deadpan peanut-gallery narration from Serial Mom's adorably arch auteur, known here as the Groom Reaper.
Waters' pasty face and sardonic sneer shine through each and every episode as he narrates these tales of romantic woes and won'ts. In one episode, a gold-digging, pistol-packing secretary marries her much-older, much-wealthier boss, but things go stale when post-nuptials she stops putting out. He coldly arranges with his lawyer to end the thing, but the little floozy returns fire with a threat of blackmail. Then Waters appears from the scenery, drolly pointing out, "They say it's the early bird that gets the worm, but in this case it's the night owl that gets the incriminating evidence." (What, huh?) Best of all, viewers throughout can text-vote which spouse they think will be the killer, since they're clearly both equally evil. Ah, true love. Another classic Waters quote? "They went from X-rated to exterminated." It's just too good.
Each episode closes with a hilariously heavy-handed "told you so" when the killer ends his or her cleverly complicated conniving by making one insanely stupid mistake, like accidentally videotaping the murder scene. The whole concept is laugh-out-loud wonderful, and as anyone who's ever seen love go wrong knows, but for a little thing called impulse control we might have all ended up like these poor sods. As Waters himself says, your goosebumps will have goosebumps.
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