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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2376 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's now Spooky Season, for which I will be using these threads as an opportunity to write about scary movies I've (re)-watched over the next two weeks. If you've watched some good (or bad) horror movies lately, feel free to reply to this comment with your thoughts.

Last night I watched Snowtown, a dramatisation of a series of vicious murders which took place in Salisbury North (a suburb in the greater Adelaide area in South Australia) between 1992-9. Going in I was expecting a horror film: what I got instead was a social realist crime drama in the vein of Shane Meadows, which is more interested in kitchen-sink scenes of people smoking in grotty tract housing than the mechanics of murder and body disposal. The violence, on the rare occasions it's shown onscreen, is excruciating, but like Meadows, most of the film's copious discomfort comes from the implied threat of violence, when the ringleader John Bunting seems superficially friendly and yet there's a constant lurking sensation that he might blow his top at the slightest provocation.

Recently, notorious child rapist and former rock frontman Ian Watkins was murdered in prison. I'm not unhappy he was killed, and yet some of the crowing over his death and how he got what was coming to him makes me uncomfortable for some reason I found it hard to put my finger on. Perhaps the most provocative scenes in Snowtown depict John Bunting and his neighbours sitting around a kitchen table discussing their frustration with the authorities' refusal to properly deal with sex offenders and child molesters in the area, and how they ought to take the law into their own hands. And indeed, many of Bunting and co.'s victims were people he claimed were paedophiles and child molesters (also homosexuals and at least one trans woman, though the film doesn't dwell on this quite as much), often on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence or baseless hearsay. The obvious implication is that Bunting had extremely violent urges which he rationalised away by claiming that he was channelling them into pro-social ends, but that when the demand for "paedos" exceeded the supply, he simply invented new ones. Paedophiles, homosexuals, trans people and junkies were seen as deserving targets in the social milieu in which he lived, so he targeted them: raised in another environment, he would've targeted communists, apostates, witches, whatever.

The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

Last night I rewatched one of my favourite psychological horror films, The Mothman Prophecies, with which I developed something of an obsession during Covid. Still holds up, even on probably my ~fifteenth watch. I've ordered the book on which it was based, curious to see how it compares.

IME the book was even freakier than the movie and I'd be most interested to read your thoughts after you finish reading it!

I'll be sure to send you a DM.

Watched Les Diaboliques from 1955, having heard it described as a psychological horror.

If it was made today, it would be called a psychological thriller, not a psychological horror. Well shot, well acted, well edited, but alas I called the twist ending in every detail about an hour in, meaning the remaining ~forty-five minutes were just an exercise in killing time. Check it out if you're less genre savvy than I am.

Half Life 2 RTX redoes Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt with top-of-the-line lighting and atmospheric effects and the results really are stunning.

Last night I rewatched Lost Highway, having not seen it for years and having recently heard it described as a psychological horror movie (which is certainly not how I remembered it). Having watched it a second (third?) time, my thoughts on it are largely unchanged and pretty much the same as everyone else's:

  1. The first forty minutes or so, before Balthazar Getty's character is introduced, are as atmospheric and chilling as anything else in Lynch's filmography (especially the first scene with Robert Blake), to the point that they overshadow the rest of the movie. This section is the only part of the movie that can be described as "horror": everything after that is a noir pastiche or a psychological thriller.
  2. Robert Loggia steals every scene he's in. They should show the tailgating scene in driver's ed, it would get a great laugh.
  3. Lynch was attempting something big and ambitious here, and didn't quite pull it off. He attempted something similar in his follow-up Mulholland Drive and had more luck there (I might even put that movie in my top ten). It's hard to put my finger on why Mulholland Drive is so much more effective than Lost Highway. It might be because all of the silly slapstick scenes in Mulholland Drive are near the beginning, whereas in Lost Highway they're in the middle, after forty minutes of steadily escalating tension and paranoia, which is tonally jarring. Both films involve characters transforming into other people, but in Mulholland Drive Naomi Watts is the leading woman throughout: having Bill Pullman suddenly become Balthazar Getty without explanation robs us of the sense of psychological continuity we'd have if it had been two characters portrayed by one actor. And four years later, Lynch had learned that the only thing worse than using a Rammstein song at the dramatic climax of the movie is using the same Rammstein song twice.

My main takeaway from this movie is that, in her youth, Patricia Arquette was fucking gorgeous. She has several nude scenes in this movie, but even just in close-ups of her talking while fully dressed, I was utterly transfixed. Normally when a movie introduces a female character that we're supposed to find beautiful by lingering on them in slomo, I'm underwhelmed (particularly if they're played by, like, Drew Barrymore). In this case I had no trouble understanding why Getty's character would risk it all for her, even knowing that she's a violent gangster's moll.

As you can probably tell, Lost Highway is my favorite David Lynch film, although TBF I've really never given Mulholland Drive its due and I really need to see it again and on the big screen before I'll feel like I've done that. Anyway, a nearby theater did a David Lynch Retrospective after his death earlier this year and I took the opportunity to see Lost Highway again on the big screen. Like you, I hadn't seen it in decades, and despite agreeing with just about everything you say, the entire movie just clicked for me from start to finish. Each and every scene, and in fact each and every beat of the movie felt sublime, flowing inexorably into the next one and the next one, ultimately building to its intense climax and conclusion. It's like I had that same spellbound feeling that you did when Patricia Arquette was onscreen except I experienced it for the entire movie. I left the theater that night feeling like I had fully grokked the film itself for the first time, almost three decades after initially seeing it in the theater. That being the case, I'd quibble a bit about whether or not Lynch pulled off what he wanted to pull of in Lost Highway, because I think he did, and say instead that the issues that you point out are all genuine and ultimately make it much less accessible than a lot of his other work.

Interesting, I've never heard someone refer to it as their favourite of his films before. For me, there are definitely parts of it that work, while other parts felt like a slog.

Totally understandable. For me, I think the reason that I love Lost Highway so much is that so many of the themes and archetypes that it plays with and explores connect with me on a personal level. I could wax poetic about it, and still might if you're interested, but for now I'll just say that I think your first post put the finger directly on the beating heart of the movie: the characters of Renee and Alice, and more specifically, how they drove Fred and Pete each to their respective extremes.

but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

I find that even in medicine I usually have to give a lecture about how it's our job to heal no matter the person when someone odious shows up. Students these days (and I think it has worsened) can't even treat someone obviously racist without losing their minds. A pedophile? Absolutely no.

This is with tolerance and acceptance baked into applications and course work at all levels.

Someone gives them the ick and they are no longer good doctors.

I can't imagine how much less professional fields without selection for this are (like the police).

Cops at least are on the radar and aware of the hypervigilance of anything resembling overtly ___-ist behavior and the repercussions that face them should they violate the Rules. Teachers on the other hand have essentially free rein to sanction, downgrade, or otherwise penalize students exhibiting (via essay or otherwise) views that they find personally repulsive (almost always this means anything right-coded.) Anything blatantly suggesting racism (imagine a well-written essay on Human Biological Determinism, without any use of epithets or slavery) could feasibly get a student reported to admin. There's a level of acceptability (I dislike using currently popular terms like Overton window) where things of this sort are treated the same as if a student were to write about the strategies in rape, or how to build some device that goes boom. I suppose a classroom is a relatively low impact environment, until of course it isn't and generations of like-minded groupthinked kids start waving flags and blocking traffic. Or worse.

Edit: I've strayed from the point.

edit 2: Sorry to sully the fun thread.

Classrooms are not low impact though. If you want to have a white collar job you’ll have to get some sort of educational certification and teachers especially in late high school and in college can tank your chances pretty quickly. And so kids either learn to fake the right opinions or actually hold them if he wants that kind of respectable job. Most kids end up holding the positions because they learned to ape them so well that they don’t bother to question it.

I think the way teachers have been in the last few decades is often on most of our minds, no worries.

The “BD” in HBD is Biodiversity, not Biological Determinism.

Indeed, I should have specified "however one parses the abbreviation HBD." I only changed it because it was once mentioned, though your spelling out of the abbreviation is probably the more accurate and common.

I have to come clean and admit I'm a big scaredy cat. Spooky stuff of any kind is my kryptonite. I have to plug my ears when I go to the movies because they always have to play a trailer for some supernatural horror movie with screams and loud slams. What's worse, I once read about the two girls that went missing in Panama before bed when I was home alone and had to psych myself up to go to the bathroom afterwards. Which was not in Panama at all, but a few meters down a well-lit hallway.

The less obvious implication (and I have no idea whether the historical record would bear this out) is that one reason Bunting and his gang evaded capture for so long is not because they managed to intimidate anyone aware of their crimes into silence, but because they managed to persuade them that all of their murders were really vigilantism, meting out "justice" to those deserving.

If you read through the wikipedia article on the murders, their entire social environment seems to have been extremely dysfunctional. Drug abuse, several mentally disabled individuals AND several schizophrenics, even the non-illegal relationships involve frequent partner switching and large age differentials (including with the mentally disabled and schizophrenics!), even the people with no directly mentioned issues somehow collect pensions for unclear reasons ... The article also directly acknowledges at least some of Bunting's victims actually being sexual abusers. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the authorities just didn't want to get involved because, as the old saying goes, "just put all of them in a sack and randomly swing a bat at it, you'll always hit the right one". Not to mean that they all really did what was alleged, but that the extreme level of dysfunction in the general community made the accusations so plausible that most just didn't want to get involved in the mess.

When writing Chinatown, Robert Towne said he was partly inspired by a conversation he'd had with a Hungarian vice cop, who claimed that there were so many competing ethnic groups and dialects in Chinatown that the police had no way of knowing whether their interventions were helping or hurting the exploited — so their policy was to do "as little as possible".

Interestingly in real life, the trans woman who was murdered (in the film exclusively referred to by their "deadname" Barry) had previously been in a sexual relationship with one of their killers. They shot a scene for the film making this explicit, but it was cut.

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