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By the time he made DRESSED TO KILL (1980, TCM, Tubi), Brian De Palma was such an overt stylist his films seemed to take place in a hermetically sealed world with less connection to reality than to other movies. In this case, he’s mirroring Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). Both feature a transgressive leading lady with whom we come to identify before she’s murdered at the end of the first act. Both end with a psychiatrist’s explanation of the plot’s psycho-sexual basis. And both resolve the mystery almost by accident as investigations of private spaces trigger the murderers to reveal their identities. There are also stylistic echoes in the way both directors use a moving camera to pull us in and rapid cutting for shock effect.

If PSYCHO is the superior film, it’s because it takes us deeper into its consideration of transgressive acts. Hitchcock transfers our sympathies to Norman Bates, suckering us in to identify with the film’s most destabilizing figure. De Palma transfers our sympathies to Nancy Allen’s Liz Blake, the world’s cutest high-priced call girl, who discovers Dickinson’s murder and has to find the real killer to clear her name. He gets in some good comic moments aimed at her and her profession — the client bragging about his stock portfolio who turns tail and runs at the sight of a dead body, Allen’s changing masks as she fields calls from her escort service and her stockbroker on two different phones, the client who can’t even acknowledge he called for her while she’s still in the hall outside his hotel room. But identifying with her doesn’t make us question the ways we invest in characters emotionally.

The film is still tremendously effective, particularly in the first half hour focusing on Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) and her frustrating marital situation. Dickinson is totally committed to Kate’s emotional state. She easily pulls us into her fantasies, her flirtation with her psychiatrist (Michael Caine) and the wordless nine-minute sequence in which she and a handsome stranger cruise each other in an art museum. That scene is De Palma’s great tour-de-force in the film. Kate is in a room with sexualized paintings as she watches a middle-aged man come on to one of the patrons and a couple cuddling as they look at the art works. It’s all sensuality, and he builds suspense so that we’re actually rooting for her to score a one-night stand. There’s a lot of good work in the rest of the film, and De Palma keeps the tension up as the killer stalks Allen, the one witness to Dickenson’s murder. Keith Gordon is particularly appealing as Dickinson’s son, who helps Allen search for the killer. Dennis Franz is the police detective putting pressure on Allen, and there are bits by Brandon Maggart and actor-playwright Samm-Art Williams.

Teenaged director/co-writer Alice Maio Mackay’s Australian punk genderqueer take on the slasher film, BAD GIRL BOOGEY (2022, Shudder, AMC+), may look like it was made for a quarter, but the talent behind it is priceless. A mystical mask turns its wearers into killers not by making them kill but rather by letting them kill. In addition, it often imparts an unhealthy dose of homophobia, courtesy of the escaped Nazi who first brought it to Australia. That sounds like a lot of baggage for one film to carry, but Mackay’s style here communicates a lot with rapid images.  And the focus is less on the standard tropes of the slasher film than on the community affected by it.

Alienated teen Angel (Lisa Fanto) has no time for the adults she feels have left her a ravaged world, but she has close bonds with her friends — including party girl Lila (Prudence Cassar), trans recovering addict Dario (Iris Mcerlean) and gay boy Ashley (Steven Thai Hoa). When the killer starts offing her friends, she doesn’t expect the police to care about a bunch of queer kids, so she and Dario start investigating on their own.

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