Nostalgia for a specific time period is usually born from a narrow, filtered, and often protected, experience of the world; plus a temporal distance which makes it easier to cherry-pick whatever you saw as “good” about it and forget or ignore the “bad”. In the case of pseudo-nostalgia for a time you never personally experienced, that cherry-picking is even easier. For those who are nostalgic or pseudo-nostalgic for the US version of “the fifties”, for example, idealize the WASP middle-class parts of it, perhaps the pre-sexual-revolution conditions, and maybe even the black-and-white conflict against the Soviets, while ignoring (or perhaps even being unaware of) the New-Deal-fueled economy, the early Drug Counterculture, and the Civil Rights movement.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this person particularly liked the proliferation of gross-out “comedies” (and more mainstream comedies which slipped in a bit of gross-out “humor”) in the 1990s, which tended to treat everyone other than a certain type of white man as subhumans to be mocked and perhaps brutalized. I saw some of those, and did not find them very funny. Thankfully most people were kind of sick or bored of them by the early 2000s, though that didn’t stop a handful more being made at the time.
And maybe, as @ShatteredGlassSkywarp said, USA Up All Night. Low-budget, cheesy, softcore films existed during the 80s, but the ’80s version tended to be mostly actually softcore porn and was only available on VHS or premium cable, while the ’90s version skirted the R-rated line and could be seen on regular cable late at night (particularly on the USA Network). Which, considering how sexist that stuff could get… I’m going to judge someone if the sexist part was what you’re nostalgic for.
[Personal aside ahead, maybe slightly TMI]
…Aaaand I will admit that I know this because I watched it. It was a guilty secret ’cause I wanted to see other women engaging in unabashed sexual freedom, but that sort of trash was the best I could find at a time¹. Not at all nostalgic for it though… because there are much better options for that now, were I inclined to seek them out (not often inclined anymore, because I basically live that in my local BDSM community).
¹Except maybe for “Basic Instinct” (1992) which managed to be significantly better for this purpose, assuming I’m not being blinkered by my own nostalgia filters.
