director/screenwriter
Jeff Lieberman
producer
George Manasse
cinematographer
Don Knight
music
Charles Gross
editor
Brian Smedley-Aston
cast
Zalman King (Jerry Zipkin)
Deborah Winters (Alicia Sweeney)
Mark Goddard (Edward Flemming)
Robert Walden (David Blume)
Charles Siebert (Detective Clay)
Ann Cooper (Wendy Flemming)
Ray Young (Wayne Mulligan)
Richard Crystal (Frannie Scott)
Brion James (Tony)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 91m
u.s.
release: 1976
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
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Blue Sunshine is a horror movie with a very specialized
target: it seems to have been made to give former hippies the
willies. Indeed, the American ads counted on it: "WARNING!
If you are one of the millions who took hallucinogens in
the late '60s...you may be a human time bomb about to explode
into a bloody nightmare of uncontrollable killing." Well,
take that, you damn ex-hippies; we told you to
just say no.
Yeah. Well, as a horror movie
that could only have been made in the '70s, Blue Sunshine
has a fair amount of charm -- kitschy charm, to be sure, but
charm just the same. An exploitation flick that appeals to both
stoners and tight-assed straights (like Midnight Express
and Joe), this must surely be the first whodunit wherein
the culprit is lysergic acid diethylamide. Yes, back there in
1967 at Stanford University, a group of otherwise unconnected
people dropped a form of acid called Blue Sunshine. Ten years
later, like some calendar-minded psycho in a slasher flick, the
acid gets its revenge. Comfortably nestled in the user's
chromosomes all these years, it kick-starts the mother of all
delayed reactions, causing the user to go bald and go violently
insane (in that order).
The hero, a presentable straight
with neat shoulder-length hair (a tolerable length by 1976),
is one Jerry Zipkin, whose friends call him Zippy, though as
played by the morose-looking Zalman King (later the director
of softcore "erotica" like Red Shoe Diaries)
he looks less zippy than anyone in screen history. Jerry, a Cornell
man back in the day, had Stanford acquaintances who now seem
to be in the throes of Blue Sunshine sunburn. He moves from place
to place, picking up clues, and also avoiding the cops, who think
he's responsible for the movie's opening mass murder. Despite
Blue Sunshine's cult rep as a wild horror item, the movie
(made by Jeff Lieberman, whose killer-worm epic Squirm
worked far harder for its notoriety) often plays like the sort
of conventional TV mystery you could almost fall asleep cozily
in front of, if not for the occasional melodramatic screeching
on the soundtrack when one of the Stanford alumni freaks out.
A considerable amount of stuff
goes on in just an hour and a half (including a red herring and
a fantastic scene in which loud disco music is used as a defensive
weapon). Notably, each of the human time bombs -- including a
nice babysitter, a cop, and a college jock turned political bodyguard
-- is respectable. You just can't tell which of the thirtyish
(well, fiftyish now), settled-down professionals among you could've
taken Blue Sunshine. Lieberman puts all the elements in place.
I had fun noticing the parallels to Taxi Driver -- the
smarmy man-of-the-people political candidate with the slogan
"Here Is the Future"; the protagonist going to a gun
shop and hearing a spiel on the superiority of his chosen firearm
(in Jerry's case, a pump-action air gun to shoot a trank dart
at unruly Blue Sunshiners).
The money scenes -- the delayed
victims literally wigging out and looking around for someone
to kill -- are well-handled, especially the sequence in which
circumstances look unpromising for a couple of little kids at
the business end of a knife. But this isn't a film by John Carpenter
(who thought nothing of wasting a little girl in Assault on
Precinct 13; incidentally, his wife Sandy King was the script
supervisor on Blue Sunshine), so more sensitive souls
can relax. Order is restored, though the movie does end with
one of those wonderful text bits that try to get you to believe
this all really happened, including the admonition that about
200 doses of Blue Sunshine remain unaccounted for. Eek! Just
like the unkillable psycho at the end of a slasher flick, that
bad acid is still out there somewhere. One is reminded
of the loudspeaker warnings in Woodstock: "Do not
take the blue acid. It will make you go bald, drive you insane,
and drastically reduce your appreciation of loud disco music."
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