DIRECTED BY: Jeff Lieberman
FEATURING: Zalman King, Robert Walden, Mark Goddard, Deborah Winters, Ann Cooper, Ray Young, Charles Siebert, Richard Crystal, Alice Ghostley, Stefan Gierasch, Brion James
PLOT: A plague of victims go bald and turn into psychotic killers; the one common factor appears to be a variety of acid, Blue Sunshine, taken during their college days.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Blue Sunshine usually gets classified as a horror/thriller with a brilliant premise behind it, but it’s also a twisted satire about what would later come to be known as “The Big Chill Generation.” It’s a lot tougher and less self-flattering than The Big Chill turned out to be. Maybe if The Big Chill had an unhinged leading man and psycho killers… but Blue Sunshine is the next best thing.
COMMENTS: “Did you ever hear the words ‘Blue Sunshine’… ?”
If it had come from grindhouse producers, a good alternate title for Blue Sunshine would have been Bad Acid, Dead Hippie,… well, make that Dead Ex-Hippie. Sort of a social satire within the parameters of a horror movie (which is pretty much Jeff Lieberman’s career in a nutshell, come to think of it), Blue Sunshine benefits from a clever premise: what if all those drug-scare films were right? It was just the right film at just the right time to skewer the Sixties generation, who were turning from lives of idealism and awareness towards materialism and narcissistic self-examination.
Even though there’s enough knowing laughs to keep the audience entertained, there’s also enough to keep them unsettled and on edge, mainly with the intense performance of Zalman King, whose protagonist might indeed turn out to be as unhinged as the Blue Sunshine victims. The violence, while relatively tame by today’s standards, also is unsettling. People get incinerated and children are threatened with knives. And there’s the minor game of guessing who might be affected and who isn’t. One clue: watch the hair.
Blue Sunshine first hit DVD as a Special Edition release from Synapse Films, which was transferred from a surviving print as the negative thought to be lost to time. In 2016 it got an upgrade to Blu-Ray from FilmCentrix, after the negative was discovered and restored.
LINKS OF INTEREST:
The Ringer – Lieberman’s first film, a pseudo-PSA that’s actually effective, but probably not in the way its sponsors realized. A clear, scathing look at ‘Youth Culture’.
Trailer for Blue Sunshine.
FilmCentrix promo for the Blu-Ray HD release.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I would argue against the inclusion of this flick, which is just not weird enough in my opinion. It’s a great cult movie though. Ostensibly it’s from the hero’s point of view, wrongly accused of the homicides committed by the bad-acid-flashbacking ex-hippies/proto-yuppies. But the point of view is subtly askew, and the flashbacking proto-yuppies are actually shown to be enacting secret wishes that surely everyone at this time nourished silently in their hearts, i. e. to go on a homicidal rampage at a disco. And then the babysitter who gets all homicidal on those horrible kids, that transcends the boundaries of any specific era and is basically a universal human fantasy (often buried and sublimated, of course). It’s kind of boring between the kills though: really just a conventional thriller with a low budget. The low budget does lend it some charm in the form of some crappy but amusing special effects, like the way the proto-yuppies lose their hair all at once before their rampages – they make no effort to hide the fact they’re just taking off a wig.