NOW ON VOD! Queer fear is here in director Alice Maio Mackay’s bloody LGBTQ+ slasher Bad Girl Boogie. Written by Mackay and Benjamin Pahl Robinson, the story begins many Halloweens ago in the spooky old Bosch house, where a group of young punks attempts a black magic ritual. This results in bloodshed when one of the participants puts on a mask they found and suddenly slays everyone else.
Slash jump to present-day Halloween, and a slayer wearing the same mask brutally murders Dr. Sherri (Erin Paterson). The doctor’s troubled teen daughter Angel (Lisa Fanto) discovers from the police reports that her mother was a lesbian like she is. She is part of an outcast group of queer kids at her school, including Dario (Iris Mcerlean), who is a recovering junkie, non-binary artist Clive (Lewi Dawson), and freewheeling Lila (Predence Cassar), who is squirming with a way older greasy guy Garry (Chris Asimos) in his van. They are all bulled relentlessly by vicious c**t Chase (Toshiro Glenn), though it seems the school takes his side more often than not.
The doctor’s troubled teen daughter Angel (Lisa Fanto) discovers from the police reports that her mother was a lesbian like she is.
Angel’s Aunt Carly (Kate Bonney), who took Angel in after her sister’s murder, is clueless about how to help Angel’s constant misery. Then a hooded slayer wearing the same mask cuts Lila up into pieces outside a nightclub they were all at. Angel and Dario become fed up with the police and start looking into the darker corners for the truth about the mask that kills.
While Bad Girl Boogie bills itself as a queer transsexual slasher, the slasher genre has a long and complex history of queer and trans representation. Unfortunately, as was the case with queerness nearly everywhere in the 1980s, we can’t talk about it. Not without spoiling a whole domino line of slashers, as the queer or trans characters were always held back for the finale. Also, they all ended up being bloodthirsty murderers, so it wasn’t the most positive representation. So it is more than fair play that we finally have queer, trans, and non-binary body counts.
