SZAMANKA
SZAMANKA is frenzied, subversive and cinematically invigorating, at once a provocative art film and a lurid thriller
SYNGENOR
SYNGENOR begins with a topless babe getting attacked by the titular creature. Later a woman is genetically combined with the Syngenor to become a slimy two-headed what’s-it. Think what you will, but I’ll always have a soft spot for movies like this
SUTURE
An interesting but overly affected psycho thriller from the nineties. SUTURE has a definite charm, though it’s all-but buried under a veritable avalanche of arty pretension
SURRENDER DOROTHY
A dark, twisted no-budgeter about a disturbed young man who attempts to turn his hetero-male roommate into Dorothy, the perfect woman
SUMMER OF SAM
From Spike Lee, a wildly overbaked yet vital account of the seventies-era “Son of Sam” killings. The film has much to say about the effects of fear and paranoia, none of it comforting
STAR TIME
One of the most idiosyncratic of all nineties-era serial killer dramas was this surreal account of a TV junkie becoming a mass murderer
SPLIT SECOND
An above average Rutger Hauer vehicle from 1992 that mixes future shock—make that schlock—and splatter
SPIKE OF LOVE
A cult movie in search of a cult, this Canadian made outrage plays like MARAT/SADE reconfigured as a nineties black comedy, being an unrestrained blast of insanity with nearly every imaginable perversion
SOMBRE
A product of the “New French Extremity” by director Philippe Grandrieux, who provides a highly artful and immersive account of a serial killer loose on the back roads of France
SMALL WHITE HOUSE
One of the key underground films of the nineties, a beyond-strange Tijuana-set reverie on the JFK assassination that freely incorporates pornography and scatology.