‘Selectively popular’ flicks are oddly appealing

Cult movie is such an ugly term. When we hear it, all we can think of are film buffs huddled in a basement, watching “Can’t Stop the Music” and sipping poisoned Kool-Aid. “Selectively popular” is more like it.

And no movie has achieved greater selective popularity in recent years than “Napoleon Dynamite,” the little $400,000 opus that came out of nowhere to inspire untold Halloween costumes and — gosh! — bad Jon Heder impersonations.

Last week, “Napoleon” writer-director Jared Hess came out with his follow-up effort, “Nacho Libre,” and as weird as the movie looks — Jack Black plays a Mexican priest who moonlights as a professional wrestler — it’s waaay too early to label it a cult classic. Until then, please accept these quotable cult offerings, humbly compiled from the fringes of mainstream cinema.

“American Psycho”(2000)

In their adaptation of the notorious Bret Easton Ellis novel, director Mary Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner milk the 1980s for pungently deliciously satire. Christian Bale, as the Park Avenue mass murderer with singularly bad taste in music, delivers line after howling line of cruel, vain and sardonic wordplay. Signature quote: “Don’t just stare at it. Eat it!”

“Blow-Up” (1966)

A swinging playboy photographer (David Hemmings) amuses himself with models and sports cars until unwittingly shooting a murder scene. Michelangelo Antonioni’s passive, impertinent direction is the essence of cool, highlighted by the most mind-blowing sex scene you’ll ever see. Cult extra: Contains a rare performance by the Jimmy Page/Jeff Beck-era Yardbirds.

“Harold and Maude” (1971)

Hal Ashby’s touchingly daft romance stars saucer-eyed Bud Cort as a death-obsessed teenager whose world is turned upside down by a lively septuagenarian funeral gadfly (Ruth Gordon). Pretty hot, huh?

Who’s in the cult? Your grandmother

“Suspiria” (1977)

Most neophytes who submit themselves to Dario Argento’s horror classic — about a ballet academy run by a coven of witches — agree it’s the scariest flippin’ thing they’ve ever seen. Argento’s innovative use of light and sound dig up the raw psychological roots of terror. Who’s in the cult? The goth chick at the video store.

“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970)

Russ Meyer’s scrumptiously overwrought “sequel” to Jacqueline Susann’s pills-and-pillows potboiler is teeming with stiff acting, outrageous dialogue and sexy girl-band melodrama. Film critic Roger Ebert’s one and only screenwriting credit. Signature quote: “This is my happening and it freaks me out!”