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.
SKINNER
If the purpose of a horror movie is to startle then this one must be counted as a success, particularly in some unforgettable gross-out moments. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that it’s standard-issue nineties straight-to-video trashola in nearly every other respect
THE SIXTH SENSE
Arguably the key horror movie of the nineties, and the film most responsible for lifting the genre out of the doldrums in which it languished for most of that decade
SIX DAYS, SIX NIGHTS
It’s time for a trip to the art house. SIX DAYS SIX NIGHTS, imported from France, is an art film with lots of heavy talk about the nature of love. But it’s also a thriller of sorts, one with enough outright macabre touches to categorize it as psychological horror