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.
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.
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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