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John Waters is intelligent, charming, and slightly deranged. Okay, more than slightly. In his wonderfully warped world, ugly is often beautiful (like his prized photo of Margaret Hamilton, autographed ''WWW,'' for Wicked Witch of the West), crime is celebrated (he took his mom to one of the Watergate trials), and odd juxtaposition reigns supreme (a text on Tourette's syndrome is featured prominently in his guest room).

Waters' latest film gives full vent to his obsessions, with an unusually A- list cast: Serial Mom offers up Kathleen Turner as a murdering matriarch (''the Breck Girl gone berserk,'' says Waters), Sam Waterston as a befuddled dad, and Patty Hearst as a juror who is slain for making a fashion faux pas-'' the only crime in the movie,'' says Waters, ''that I really do think someone should die for.''

Turner wanted the role (''though one hates to feel that one is as tasteless and sick as John Waters,'' she says), partly because she appreciates his portrayal of even the most grotesque characters. ''He treats them so kindly. He never puts them down. That really protects their weirdness.'' It's what Waters calls good bad taste. ''Good bad taste looks up to the subject matter, and bad bad taste looks down on it,'' he explains. ''I never feel superior to my characters.'' After all, this is the guy who was slicing organs on celluloid long before anyone heard of Lorena Bobbitt; whose cinematic creations included a girdle-wearing, egg-worshiping grandma; and whose idea of a happy ending is Divine snacking on dog doo.

With a $3 million price tag for Mom and an Oscar nomination on her resume, Turner is a drastic departure from the actor most associated with Waters, the transvestite comedian Divine. But Waters sees some similarities. ''They're both very good actors, both are bigger than life, and they're movie stars. There's not many of those three in my book.'' Divine, who died of heart failure at 42 in 1988, is still very much in Waters' thoughts: He filmed Turner running down a teacher at Divine's old school because he'll never forgive the teachers there for how horrible they were to his friend.

That loyal sensibility explains why Waters, 48, still lives in his hometown of Baltimore, and why he still sports the same pencil-thin black mustache he grew 24 years ago to imitate Little Richard. Waters' taste for kitsch is also undiminished: He lives alone in a house filled with antiques, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, plastic food-a prime rib here, some sushi there-and an occasional portrait of a serial killer.

But time has brought a few changes. Waters is mellower now than he was at 20, when he did everything on his films: wrote the scripts, scouted the locations, financed, directed, and produced. ''I used to say I wanted to die on a roller coaster that jumps off the tracks at a packed state fair,'' he recalls. ''But I certainly don't want that now. I'd like to die here in my bed, in my sleep.''

This strange sort of calm extends to his professional outlook. ''I take my career very seriously, but I have fun with the work,'' he explains. ''I'm never saying this is some profound thing. I hate that. When people say 'your art,' I say, 'Oh, please, I make movies.'''

And the movies he makes are so uniquely twisted they deserve their own crooked video-store shelf. Here is Waters' own resume, with commentary and grades assigned by the auteur himself:


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