An acid-tongued denunciation of political-commodity fetishism, Blue Sunshine remains a neglected genre classic that delivers a deft fusion of horror-movie tropes, social satire, and cult-film weirdness. The premise is, in every sense of the word, fantastic: A group of ’60s-era college types who tripped out on the eponymous batch of LSD succumb to “chromosomal damage” 10 years later, lose all their hair, and turn into homicidal lunatics. By flipping the script, taking the U.S. government’s horror stories about acid usage at face value, writer-director Jeff Lieberman elaborates on a scenario that interrogates the counterculture’s mythic appraisal of its own legacy, while at the same time sticking it to middle-class conformism and suburban anomie.
Before the opening credits are even over, a series of vignettes introduces most of the film’s characters and adumbrated its principal themes. A cancer-riddled patient of Dr. David Blume (Robert Walden) tells him that he doesn’t look so good. Housewife Mrs. O’Malley (Adriana Shaw) complains to a neighbor about her husband’s bad dreams, hard drinking, and hair loss. Babysitting her friend’s two children, Wendy (Ann Cooper) watches a political ad for her ex-husband, aspiring politico Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard).
The ad copy runs: “In the 1960s, Ed Flemming and his generation shook up the system. Now he’s working within it.” Revolution quickly turns to accommodation and collaboration, and later speeches by the man emphasize his rhetorical hollowness (“We can and we must! We must and we will!”)—that he’s ready and willing to capitalize on selling out the past.
The subsequent scene introduces us to Blue Sunshine’s hero, career peacenik Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), and his girlfriend, Alicia (Deborah Winters). The inviting cabin setting could have been lifted straight from The Big Chill save for its ambience of free-floating oddity. Partygoers mingle and small talk in front of a flickering hearth. All of a sudden, a man (Brion James), suffering it seems from some sort of flashback, starts flapping his arms and squawking around the room. But this nothing compared to what happens when host Frannie Scott (Richard Crystal) is outed as a maniac with a bald pate spotted with long tufts of hair. He proceeds to wreak havoc, including tossing one of his guests into the fireplace. So much for fellow feeling.
Lieberman reuses a simple yet effective audio montage technique when Wendy Flemming goes mad. Hallucinating a crescendo of children screeching her name over and over, interspersed with clamorous calls for hot dogs and Dr. Pepper, she tries in vain to stave it off by swallowing handfuls of Anacin. Giving in at last, she goes after the kids with a butcher knife.
Later, Zipkin waits for Blume in Echo Park, hoping to score some tranquilizers he hopes will be enough to take down a rampaging maniac. A junkie (Jeffrey Druce) takes him for a fellow traveler, sidling up to him in commiseration. When Jerry’s spooked by a bald weirdo, who resembles a cross between the lead singer for Midnight Oil and Pluto from The Hills Have Eyes, the junkie scares him off by bawling “Get outta here!” in his face until he does. According to Lieberman, it was an impromptu moment, created on location, and it exemplifies the disorienting, borderline surreal touches, unmotivated and even unwarranted by the strict exigencies of story, that build an atmosphere of pervasive abnormality.
Speaking of atypical, future softcore producer Zalman King turns in a bizarrely binary performance as Jerry, vacillating between doing next to nothing, whispering his lines, twitching like a drowsy epileptic, and dialing it all the way to 10 for full freak-out intensity. Mannered doesn’t even begin to describe him, yet somehow it all comes together, in tandem with the thorough-going elements of grotesquerie described elsewhere.
The mind-blowing conclusion takes place at Shoppers World, one of the first suburban mall complexes, the setting for Ed Flemming’s election eve “get out the vote” spectacular, complete with Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra puppets providing featured entertainment. As in Dawn of the Dead, the mall is where we go because we don’t know any better, the likeliest place to be sold a bill of goods, whether it passes for pleasure or policy. In an earlier scene, when Wendy and Jerry discuss her ex, he says, “I saw him at a rally last week. He’s an excellent salesman.”
It all culminates with Jerry having to take down Ed’s right-hand man, Wayne (Ray Young), when he runs amok. Jerry’s evolution over the course of the film from sweater-clad swinger to ersatz gunslinger, as well as his involvement with the inner workings of a political campaign, plays like a dim parody of Taxi Driver. In the film’s deeply ironical final shot, superimposed titles inform the viewer with mock solemnity that, according to the findings of a specially convened DEA task force, over 200 doses of Blue Sunshine LSD remain unaccounted for.
Image/Sound
Synapse’s 2160p UHD transfer, sourced from the original 35mm camera negative of the film, is an absolute wonder. Colors are vivid, grain pleasingly cinematic, and black levels deep and uncrushed. There’s also a significant uptick in fine details. Audio comes in either Master Audio original theatrical mono or a repurposed 5.1 surround mix supervised by director Jeff Lieberman, which really opens up the soundscape, really delivering everything from the crackling of a fireplace to the bonkers score from Charles Gross.
Extras
Synapse brings together a satisfying selection of extras. New here is a very short introduction by Lieberman touching on the C.I.A.’s experimental (mis)use of LSD, as well as a lengthy Q&A from the Fantasia Film Festival premiere of Blue Sunshine’s 4K restoration. We also get two commentary tracks with Lieberman, one moderated by film historian Howard S. Berger, the other by filmmaker Elijah Drenner. Topics spread across both that Lieberman touches on include the vicissitudes of low-budget filmmaking, rendering actors bald, his experiences on LSD, government propaganda against psychedelics, the difficulties of working with Zalman King, and some of his filmmaking influences. Elsewhere, we get two cuts of Lieberman’s 1972 short marketing satire “The Ringer,” one featuring an audio commentary with Lieberman and Berger. Rounding out the supplements are three on-camera interviews with the filmmaker and two priceless LSD scare films from the late 1960s: “LSD-25” and “LSD: Insight or Insanity?”
Overall
Jeff Lieberman’s hilarious and disturbing Blue Sunshine gets a very welcome 4K upgrade and a satisfying roster of supplements from Synapse Films.
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