Boardinghouse (Johnn Wintergate, 1982)

This movie is craaaaaazy! Boardinghouse is possibly the most insane thing I've ever seen, and part of me is convinced it was made by aliens who took human form but didn't get enough intel about our species before rolling the camera. Is it good? Several more tests must be conducted in the lab before anyone even comes close to an answer. Did I love it? Yes, I did. Every moment seems completely improvised on the spot. Every scene is insane. Every character is a total weirdo. Is it the first telekinetic haunted house slasher hypnosis New Age self-help T&A bikini party rock 'n' roll film with an extended pie-fight sequence? Probably. Is it the first shot-on-video horror film to be blown up to 35mm and play in theaters? Yes (despite the claims from the makers of Blood Cult, another film I've reviewed on this site, who didn't make their shot-on-video horror film until 1985).

Boardinghouse is the brainchild of still-married musician couple John Wintergate aka Johnn Wintergate aka Hawk Adly aka Hawk Adley aka Jonema aka Johnima and Kalassu aka Kalassu Kay aka Kalassu Wintergate. The Wintergates are musicians who make New Age music and "spiritual rock" together, and they've also, together or separately, written and performed folk music, '80s new wave pop, and '70s guitar rock. The Wintergates were at a party where everyone was watching a print of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they got the idea to make a cheap horror film with comedic moments and sex appeal that would also incorporate some of their spiritual beliefs. Boardinghouse is the delightfully bonkers result. John wrote and directed, Kalassu was the assistant director, and they both played leading roles and performed the music.

So, what is this thing all about? I'll try to describe the indescribable. John aka Hawk plays Jim Royce. He inherits a 10-bedroom house in the Mulholland area of Los Angeles from his late uncle. Jim has an office downtown, and his job vaguely involves blueprints and printouts of "business plans," but mostly we just see him meditating on his desk in skimpy underwear as he practices his telekinesis. Jim has mild telekinetic powers, you see. Unfortunately, he doesn't have psychic powers, because he would have known that the house he inherited is haunted by a malevolent entity that causes people to do terrible things. Instead, Jim decides to rent nine of the 10 bedrooms to a bevy of bikini babes who are single, between the ages of 18 and 25, and ready to mingle. A 10th babe shows up out of the blue, Debbie (Lindsay Freeman), and she rents the storage room. Debbie is a little mysterious, but she doesn't stick out as too strange in this bunch of eccentric characters.

Jim and his babes have a lot of fun around the pool, the house, the boudoir, the shower, and the local pizza parlor, and Jim gets especially close to Victoria (Kalassu), who becomes an instant convert to self-actualization through telekinesis. Soon, she's harnessing her own telekinetic powers. But Debbie's got some telekinetic powers of her own, with her own designs on Jim, and wild accidents and nightmarish hallucinations keep happening to the women. 

Into this maelstrom of sexy, poolside eccentricity comes a private eye hired by an angry fiance of one of the women, the angry fiance himself, a couple of police detectives who are old friends of Jim's, Victoria's new wave band 33 1/3 to play the bitchin' housewarming party (a real band of the same name fronted by Kalassu), a magician also performing at the party, an alcoholic client of Jim's, Victoria's hilariously sleazy party-loving agent, and the gardener who "came with the house" (also played by John aka Hawk). The gardener, a Vietnam vet who saved Jim's uncle in 'Nam but lost part of his mind in the process, looks like a cross between GG Allin, every member of LA Guns, every member of Motorhead besides Lemmy, and John Heard's character from Cutter's Way.

Boardinghouse is a wild, freaky ride that amps up the freakitude right at the point where the film starts to drag a little. It is a strange, unique thing, and I love that it exists. It's also super cute that the Wintergates are still married and still performing music as Lightstorm, though they left Hollywood for the Idaho mountains several years ago to raise their two children. Drag City even put out a compilation of their music a couple years ago.   

The Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda, 1972)

An art-horror oddity from Spain, The Blood Spattered Bride is a loose adaptation of Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu's famous vampire novella Carmilla. A work that predated Stoker's Dracula by 26 years, Carmilla has inspired several stories, novels, films, songs, and television episodes. Aranda's 1972 take on the source material is fascinating, weird, and full of memorable images, but it can also be pretentious and silly, and Aranda sends a lot of mixed messages by bouncing back and forth between morality tale, leering exploitation film, and atmospheric mood piece. It's a confused but potent mix, and I ended up liking it more than I disliked it.

About those mixed messages. Aranda's film shares with Le Fanu's source material a simultaneous erotic fascination with lesbianism and a "moral" aversion to it. The film rebukes Spanish machismo and the stupid and grotesque parts of masculinity in several sharp, funny scenes, but Aranda's camera also lingers on and leers up and down his actresses' bodies. And he interrupts his atmospheric approach to horror a few times to drown the frame in buckets of blood. This is a criticism, in part, but it's also an interested observation. Human lives are filled with contradictions and hypocrisies and confusions and the particular strains of ignorance prevalent in whichever historical and cultural moment we find ourselves in, and so are the movies.

The Blood Spattered Bride opens with newlyweds Susan (Maribel Martin) and her never-named husband (Simon Andreu) arriving at a fancy hotel for their first night of marriage. Susan is a virgin, and she convinces Husband to leave the hotel after a vivid nightmare/hallucination of a man who looks exactly like him jumping out of a closet and strangling her and molesting her corpse. Husband, who is a jobless wealthy heir to an aristocratic family, moves her into the family home, currently occupied by a pair of married servants (Angel Lombarte and Montserrat Julio) and their twelve-year-old daughter Carol (Rosa Rodriguez). Carol is mostly silent and mysterious, with a demeanor that seems both older and younger than twelve.

Husband doesn't waste any time being a jerk, tearing Susan's wedding dress off  her and constantly wanting sex and pulling her hair and treating her like a child when she tries to talk to him about her vivid nightmares, but she soon starts standing up for herself and finding ways to pierce his unearned confidence. The nightmares increase in power and intensity, though, and much is made of a gnarly looking dagger that keeps appearing and reappearing, even after Husband repeatedly hides it. He thinks his wife is hysterical and childish, and he enlists a doctor friend to inject her with sedatives and generally double the sexism and condescension around the house.

There's also the matter of the family portraits. Only the men's portraits are hanging in the house, with the women's chucked in the cellar, including a strange portrait missing its face that shows a blood-streaked woman's body in a wedding dress holding a dagger. You know, normal shit. Could it be the woman who keeps appearing to Susan in both her dreams and strange, fleeting moments while she's awake? And what happens when Husband finds a nude woman buried in sand, wearing a snorkel, on the beach and brings her back to the house to recuperate when she refuses help from the police, in a bonkers scene? Possible spoiler alert: maybe she's a vampire and the one from the dreams and the faceless portrait.

As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this movie, and Aranda finds so many great ways to tell this story visually, even when the screenplay and dialogue lag behind. There's a dreamy, hypnotic quality to the images, and Aranda finds a poetic way to frame shots about women having to deal with stupid, overbearing, and controlling men. (Though he also throws in a ton of gratuitous nudity.) The slow emergence of the vampire part of the story helped to ever so gradually increase the feeling of dread. My wife pointed out, though, that the film's first half mostly places us within Susan's point of view, while the second half detaches that perspective to focus on the plot, which is a little jarring. The images remain powerful, however, especially a too-brief shot of Susan and the mystery woman walking into the woods at night. The Blood Spattered Bride is a mixed bag, for sure, but one worth seeing. It's easy to understand why this became a cult film. 

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

After the studio compromises of the previous year's Dracula, Tod Browning went full Tod Browning and then some for 1932's Freaks, returning to his favorite subject, the backstage lives of damaged people on the lower rungs of show business (carnivals, circuses, magic shows, off-off-off-Broadway theater, etc.). Browning, who worked in both vaudeville and the circus for years before making films, has a real affinity and empathy for performers and the backstage life, but he's equally clear-eyed about the darkness, cruelty, and inhumanity that's also a big part of the business and some of the people who work in it.

Freaks is a film that could only have existed in the pre-Code early 1930s in its specific mixture of sincerity, exploitation, shock, empathy, and prejudice, but it had to wait a while for an audience. It's a film that is very much a product of its time as well as a giant boot to the face of the Hollywood status quo. Any attempt to make something like it now would be too self-aware, simultaneously watered-down and deliberately tasteless in ways this film could never be, in the case of the former, and only occurring by accident or convention, in the case of the latter. Browning walks a strange tightrope in Freaks, presenting his cast as complicated human beings with inner lives while also benefiting from the same gawking sensationalism that is the circus freak show. Browning's film is both sophisticated and naive and a film experience unlike any other. No wonder people in 1932 didn't know what the hell to make of it.

Freaks was a critical and commercial failure upon initial release (except in a handful of cities, especially San Diego, where there were lines around the block for weeks and where it broke box office records; the other cities that loved it were Cincinnati, Cleveland, Boston, Houston, and Omaha), suffering condemnation from both prudish, moral majority types and prejudiced people disgusted by the physical disabilities of most of the cast members. Many cities and states banned the film, and it was also banned in the UK and Australia. Myrna Loy turned down the role of Olga, horrified by the script, and Victor McLaglen and Jean Harlow also turned down offered roles. Many cast members weren't allowed to eat in the studio cafeteria. MGM head Louis B. Mayer tried to shut the film down shortly after production, but production chief Irving Thalberg talked him down. Thalberg was one of the film's only champions during production, but he expected a big hit after Dracula did so well, and he'd promised Browning creative freedom on Freaks.

After the first few weeks of release, a handful of scenes were cut, shortening the movie from 90 minutes to the 64 minutes that survive today. A few scenes were trimmed for their disturbing or violent content, but several scenes that humanized the "freaks" and criticized their exploitation by circus owners were also removed. The box office didn't improve with the new cut, and the criticism only increased, so MGM withdrew Freaks from circulation and sold the distribution rights to Dwain Esper, infamous for his traveling roadshows of lurid film reels, including nudist camp footage. Esper traveled the country with the film for years, retitling it Forbidden Love and Nature's Mistakes to drum up new business.

Freaks finally started finding an appreciative cult audience in the '60s, as the film found a home at drive-ins and grindhouse theaters and on late-night TV. The counterculture was growing, and misfits all over the world discovered Freaks. Its cult popularity only increased with the rise of the midnight movie in the '70s (El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead, and revivals of Reefer Madness and Freaks becoming belated midnight hits) and home video in the '80s. The movie resonated with horror fans, punk rockers, metalheads, underground comic book lovers, college film societies, RE/Search and Feral House and Church of the Sub-Genius types, and many other pockets of subculture weirdness. Some of this interest was sensational, of course, but a lot of it was sincere appreciation for Browning's filmmaking and his depiction of societal outcasts forming their own tightly knit community, which resonated with misfit kids everywhere. I'm not sure what today's youth would make of it, as online culture fragments into tiny subdivisions and everyone becomes a lonely community of one trapped in their own personal algorithm.

So, anyway, do I even need to give a little synopsis? You've probably seen Freaks if you're reading this, but if you haven't, SEE IT! It's Browning's sound-film masterpiece (his best silent films are also mind-blowing). It's life-affirming, funny, creepy, and sad. It will make you feel many conflicting things. It will disturb you. It's exciting, it's short, it's weird, it's visceral, it's both loosely plotted and tightly constructed, it's full of powerful images, it's not like other movies. See it and become one of us! One of us! We accept you, one of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

Kathryn Bigelow hasn't lost a step in terms of filmmaking technique, visual style, and visceral intensity in her more recent political-historical films (though I am ambivalent at best about white people telling black people's stories in Detroit and I can't decide whether Zero Dark Thirty is an admittedly exciting and skillful piece of jingoistic CIA propaganda or a complex critique of American foreign policy or some unsettling mixture of the two), but I miss the weirder, wilder genre filmmaking of her pre-Hurt Locker career despite my continued admiration of her talent.

Aside from the soggy The Weight of Water, her mostly disastrous attempt at a self-conscious art film, Bigelow made a string of good to great films in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s that shared with Walter Hill an ability to take the American action movie and make it personal, strange, and beautiful without sacrificing any of the excitement and fun. After the cult success of her debut, rockabilly biker movie The Loveless (co-directed and co-written with film school buddy Monty Montgomery, who later became a producer and starred as the creepy cowboy in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive), Bigelow knocked it out of the park with Near Dark, a horror/western/road movie about a traveling group of vampires, and Point Break, a one-of-a-kind blend of crime thriller/action/police procedural/Zen surfer-dude movie and kept the momentum with the slightly lesser but still pretty damn good dystopic sci-fi epic Strange Days and Das Boot-esque wartime submarine movie K-19: The Widowmaker.

In between Near Dark and Point Break, Bigelow made one of her most neglected films, Blue Steel. A highly stylized blend of cop thriller and horror, Blue Steel under-performed at the box office and hasn't received as much recognition as most of her other work, but it's pretty damn interesting and sadly has a lot of contemporary political resonance.
Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Megan Turner, a policewoman in New York City who has just graduated from the academy. Her first day on the job, she shoots and kills an erratic and disturbed man robbing a grocery store after he points his gun at her (the robber is played by Tom Sizemore in an early role), but his gun is never found and Megan is demoted to an office job for using excessive force. The reason no one found the gun is because a man shopping in the store at the time of the attempted robbery, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), steals it and sneaks out amidst the confusion. Eugene is a gold futures trader on the New York Stock Exchange by day and a crazed serial killer by night. He immediately falls in love with Megan and scratches her name on the bullets he uses, which gets Megan's colleagues all kinds of suspicious. Eugene then ingratiates himself into Megan's life and causes all kinds of trouble for everyone.

Blue Steel almost works as a horror movie and almost works as a cop movie, but there's something a little discombobulating about its rhythms and structure and interactions between characters. Something is a little off. This uneasy tone could be a weakness in a straightforward genre film, but Blue Steel is going for something different. Bigelow has made a film about how the default setting in our society is a disbelief and mistrust of women. Megan is not believed when she says the robber had a gun, and she is not believed when she says Eugene is a dangerous man who is responsible for the killings. Eugene is believed when he lies and manipulates the truth and gaslights Megan in front of her fellow cops. Megan is not believed until the only man who believes her, a detective named Nick Mann (Clancy Brown), finally has enough evidence to make Eugene a suspect and brings this evidence to other men.

Bigelow does something quietly radical stylistically to express this anger and frustration, which causes an uneasy tension in the viewer that could be misread as tonal confusion on the part of the filmmaker. Bigelow creates a central character who is subtle, believable, and real and surrounds her with exaggerated types. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan with a relaxed, lived-in, naturalness (this role is further proof that Curtis is an underrated and excellent actor) while her world is populated with the deranged psycho killer (Silver giving it the balls-to-the-wall treatment), the tough, jaded New Yawk detective (Clancy Brown), the beleagured, exasperated police chief (Kevin Dunn), the high-powered asshole lawyer (Richard Jenkins), the abusive, angry father and mousy, intimidated mother (Philip Bosco and Louise Fletcher), and the supportive, matchmaking, and kindhearted best friend (Elizabeth Pena).

These are all reliable movie types we've seen before, and the talented actors give them their stylized best, but Curtis's Megan is someone we don't usually see in the movies, a unique individual with her own non-mannered quirks, inner life, and mysterious motivations, and the interplay between her and the other characters makes the film strange, powerful, and uncomfortable. Bigelow also uses and subverts the weight of Curtis's former status as Scream Queen as Megan battles Eugene, who just keeps coming at her like some kind of stockbroker Michael Myers. Framing all this is a visual style that incorporates influences from German Expressionism, '40s film noir, '70s paranoid thrillers, and '80s slasher horror into a subjective whole about a woman continually running into doors shut by men. Blue Steel should be better known.

Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984)

The Coen Brothers have often been dismissive of their first film, a pitch-black noir with moments of humor, and I understand how the roughness and naivete in an artist's early work can make the creator of it wince, but for most of us Coen Brothers fans, Blood Simple is a confident and assured debut with a lot more rawness and grit than you'll find in the rest of the brothers' stylized and meticulous filmography (including True Grit).

That confidence was mostly feigned. Except for a handful of the actors, the filmmakers and their crew had never been on a feature film set before. Joel Coen has said that cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (who also shot Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing and eventually became a successful mainstream Hollywood director) was so nervous about his lack of experience that he vomited each day after the dailies. The brothers made a few amateur short films and a two-minute Blood Simple preview starring their friend Bruce Campbell that they used to find investors for the full-length film, but Ethan had no other filmmaking experience. Joel was a little more seasoned. He attended a semester of film school at the University of Texas in Austin before transferring to NYU's film program, where he made a 30-minute short as his thesis project. He then worked as a production assistant on educational films and music videos and was the assistant editor on two horror movies, Fear No Evil and his buddy Sam Raimi's debut, The Evil Dead, but Blood Simple would be his first time behind the camera directing a full-length, commercially distributed movie.

Blood Simple opens with shots of the central Texas landscape and a monologue from one of the main characters, a sleazy private detective named Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh). The Coens, in the first of a long tradition of writing parts for specific actors, wrote Visser with Walsh in mind. A seasoned character actor with a long CV, Walsh was initially reluctant to take the part in a low-budget indie from first-time directors because the pay was so low, but he liked the script and relented. Next, we meet our two leads, a bartender named Ray (John Getz, a TV veteran in his third film role) and the wife of the bar's owner, Abby (Frances McDormand, in her first movie part). Ray is driving Abby home from the bar, but the two take a detour to a motel to begin an affair after Abby complains about her husband and Ray tells her he's always liked her.

The bar's owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya, the other seasoned movie pro in the cast) suspects his wife of an affair before it's even happened and has hired Visser to follow her around. Visser takes photos of Abby and Ray, shows them to Marty, a murder-for-hire plot is hatched, a con and a grift are attempted, multiple misunderstandings occur, and things get bloody and weird before wrapping up in a stylish, tense, violent, and wryly funny conclusion.

Though all Coen films, even their wackiest screwball comedies, have moments of darkness, Blood Simple remained their most relentlessly bleak vision until their next Texas noir, No Country for Old Men, in 2007. Though the film gives birth to several recognizably Coenesque signatures, Blood Simple is one of the only Coen films that feels like it exists in our mundane, everyday world (I'd include parts of Fargo, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis in that group, though those films also have heightened or fable-like moments).

Visser is the first of many loquacious, stylized, and eccentric characters created by the brothers, but much of the film's dialogue is naturalistic and laconic, and even big talkers like Visser and Abby mostly keep quiet in the film's second half unless they have something they need to say. These people feel much more viscerally real-world than the subsequent films' more exaggerated characters (which is not a criticism of the later films, I generally enjoy the stylized world the Coens create), but we also know less about them than we do the people in the brothers' other work.

Using just a few locations in Austin and Hutto, Texas, Blood Simple creates a nervous, claustrophobic atmosphere, and the Coens make excellent use of windows, headlights, slightly ajar doors, footsteps, beads of sweat, and droplets of blood. In its many expressive closeups of Frances McDormand's face, Blood Simple also documents Joel's falling in love with her. The two started dating during the film's shoot and married two years later. The part of Abby was originally intended for Holly Hunter (whose voice appears on an answering machine message late in the film), but her role in a play prevented her from doing the film. Hunter suggested her roommate, theater actor McDormand, which worked out great creatively and romantically. McDormand is, as always, excellent, but she claims she was so nervous about being in her first movie that she wasn't acting, just reacting.

Blood Simple was the first shot across the bow for the brothers in a remarkable career that's only dipped in quality a couple times (I'm lukewarm on O Brother Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers, but I love everything else), and their first four films established the elements they've been mixing and matching in surprisingly creative ways ever since: film noir (Blood Simple), screwball comedies (Raising Arizona), archly stylized retro-Hollywood genre films (Miller's Crossing), and dark comedy-dramas about the horror of existential crises (Barton Fink). Blood Simple may be cruder and less assured than what would come next, but it's got atmosphere and feel, a compelling story, great faces, and more dirt under its fingernails than any of their other movies, and it establishes crime and deception as the brothers' great subjects, one or both of which play a part in every Coen film.

Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

Carl Dreyer, one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived, a pioneer of what would later be called the "art film," and the writer/director of such astonishing masterpieces as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud, made one of the eeriest, dreamiest, and strangest horror films in Vampyr. It's a film that seems both older and decades newer than its 1932 release date, and though it shares a few small affinities with Dreyer's other films and the vampire genre, it stands apart from both as its own weird object. (Some kinship can be found with Dreyer's horror/comedy/public service announcement short film They Took the Ferry, another delightfully strange detour for Dreyer.)

Vampyr, in its first third, seems to be a mostly plotless collection of surreal images and nightmare logic, which is more than fine with me, but a narrative slowly and seamlessly emerges from the darkness. Even as the narrative takes shape, the images remain rooted in dream. It's a mysterious, unsettling film.

We begin with a young man obsessed with the occult named Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg under the pseudonym Julian West) arriving at an inn in a seaside French village named Courtempierre. He sees a lot of strange things, one of which is an old man coming into his room at night and giving him a cryptic message about not letting a woman die and presenting a letter that must not be opened until the older man's death. Allan wanders from the inn to an abandoned building full of strange shadows moving on their own. These shadows lead him to a large country manor. He looks in the window and sees the lord of the manor, who is the same man who entered his room at the inn. A shadow shoots and kills the lord. Allan tries to save him. The attempt is unsuccessful, but the servants and a daughter of the lord ask him to stay. The other daughter has been bitten by a vampire, and Allan becomes a part of the fight to save her and prevent her from turning into a vampire as well as an unwitting pawn in the vampire's human servants' attempt to turn her.

This plot description sounds conventional on the page, but it's only a thread connecting the incredible images. Allan's search for the manor makes little narrative sense until he reaches it, the thin gauze covering the camera lens creates a suspended-in-nightmare look, the locations are both visceral and surreal, the extremely sparse dialogue creates a hypnotic silent-film feel, and the mostly unprofessional cast appear haunted, frozen. Everything is a little off from the way other movies work.

Dreyer, a Dane who mostly used Denmark as the source for his locations and casts, filmed Vampyr in the French countryside with an international cast discovered on the streets of Paris, with the exception of two professional actors, Sybille Schmitz as the sister bit by the vampire and Maurice Schutz as the lord of the manor. Gunzburg, a Parisian who was an heir to his Russian noble family's fortune, agreed to finance the film in exchange for the leading role. Fortunately, he had an amazing face and dreamlike gait that suits the film perfectly. He used the name Julian West because his family strongly disapproved of acting. He later moved to the United States, becoming a fashion journalist and mentor to Calvin Klein.

Vampyr, Dreyer's first sound film, was dubbed into French, German, and English in an attempt to hit as many large markets as possible and was one of his only films to be conceived with commercial profits in mind, though Dreyer's creative approach remained defiantly his own. Oddly, the film was received negatively by critics, especially in Germany, though time has been kind, with most film historians and critics in the present regarding it as another Dreyer masterpiece. I think it's great, too.

Blue Sunshine (Jeff Lieberman, 1977)

Blue Sunshine is exactly the kind of weirdo, creepy, funny, smart, stupid, cult '70s horror movie I love, and it's strange I hadn't seen it until last night. Writer/director Jeff Lieberman has a distinctively oddball point of view, and the film is packed with memorable faces, locations, events, visual jokes and commentary, and tons of atmosphere. It's also a pretty great horror movie spin on the death of the hippie dream, the '70s hangover, and the creeping changes leading to what would become the Reagan '80s. Blue Sunshine is right up my alley.

After a series of ominous vignettes introducing several of the film's characters (and a few people we won't see again) whose connections to each other we don't yet understand, the film opens with a small but raging house party somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. A group of thirty-somethings are boozing it up, flirting, getting silly, and cutting loose (in particular, much-missed character actor Brion James in an early role, presumably high on something and pretending to be a large, squawking bird to annoy his friends). Photographer Frannie Scott (played by Richard Crystal, Billy Crystal's brother!) bounces down the stairs, announcing that he's going to take a group photo, but first, he does a Sinatra impersonation and kisses one of his buddy's girlfriends. When his friend grabs Frannie gently by the hair to stop him from drunkenly getting fresh with his partner, all of Frannie's hair comes off, including his eyebrows. Frannie's eyes get disturbingly weird, and he runs off into the night.

Three women stay at the house, but the rest of the party-goers pile into a car to go looking for him, with the exception of the very intense Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), who goes off into the woods with a flashlight to look for Frannie. When Frannie returns, everyone is sorry they found him. He's turned homicidally berserk. What happened to him? The possibly clairvoyant Zipkin intends to find out, damn it! Zalman King gives one of the most intense '70s B-movie performances of all time in this movie. He's like a mixture of Nicolas Cage, Dead Zone Christopher Walken, and '80s Sean Penn at full throttle. Even when he's calm, he looks like he's waiting to explode. BTW, Zalman King later transitioned from acting to writing, directing, and producing, with erotic thrillers the bulk of his filmography. His credits as filmmaker include Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid, Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue, Delta of Venus, the Red Shoe Diaries TV show, Women of the Night, and Zalman King's Sex, Y & Z. He died in 2012 at the erotic age of 69 from the not-erotic-at-all cause of colon cancer.

What follows is a string of people losing all their body hair and turning into mass murderers, the connection between them being matriculation at Stanford in the late '60s and the ingestion of a strain of LSD called "blue sunshine" while there. Blue sunshine has one hell of a flashback ten years later, causing the ultimate bad trip. These blue sunshine acid casualties give off a religious cult vibe in appearance once they lose their hair, particularly Ann Cooper as Wendy Flemming. It's hard not to think of the Manson Family women when you see her bald, in a red robe, going after her neighbor's children with a large kitchen knife.

It's just one of the film's many expressions of the curdled '60s dream of peace and love, some other favorites being a woman talking about how the breakup of The Beatles was much more traumatic for her than her divorce, eccentric and desperate drug addicts and space cases in a run-down MacArthur Park, an overzealous young man working behind the counter in a gun shop, and two old photos of a future congressional candidate as, respectively, Uncle Sam flipping the bird and a cosmic acid guru. By the way, that candidate's campaign slogan, "Make America Good Again," sent both a chuckle and a wave of revulsion through me.

The weirdness culminates in a pretty amazing finale in one of those huge shopping malls that would powerfully symbolize mainstream American culture, aspiration, fantasy, and commerce for the next 15+ years, taking in a discotheque, a big Sears-like store, and a sparsely attended campaign rally and its opening act, a puppet show with Streisand and Sinatra puppets.

Lieberman, who has a small but eccentric filmography respected by horror lovers (I've also seen his alien invasion movie Remote Control and look forward to seeing his others), keeps things weird and exciting. The narrative doesn't always hold together, and the characters sometimes make baffling or stupid decisions, but these are minor quibbles in the context of the strange and wonderful whole. We get the feeling that murderous, hairless acid freaks are just one of the many strange things going on in any given block of this bizarre, inexplicable, insane country. 

Shopping, drugs, guns, murder, football, bratty children, exotic pets, dishonest politicians, expensive colleges, TV, celebrity puppets. America, baby. We've always been a shitshow, always will be, but at least that shitshow is weird as hell. Blue Sunshine gets it, and I love it.