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.
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