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
The transfer appears identical to the remastered, uncut version produced for the 2003 Synapse Films release. Lamentably, the New Video edition features only the Dolby 2.0 stereo track, not the pumped-up Dolby 5.1 remix available on the Synapse disc. The picture can get grainy and soft in low-light conditions, and artifacts and blemishes are still plentiful, but otherwise it’s eminently watchable. The Dolby stereo track conveys dialogue tolerably, but when it comes to putting across Charles Gross’s eerie gong-and-string score, let alone “Disco Blue” bump-and-grind, the remix is sorely missed.
Extras
Barebones compared to the Synapse release. Since the new 40-minute interview with the writer-director covers much the same ground as the 2003 version, discussing the genesis of Blue Sunshine, haphazard filming conditions, and the current state of the horror genre (with particular attention to the cult of the cash-in remake), it’s fortunate that Jeff Lieberman remains a lively and amusing tour guide. The only other supplement, an attenuated photo gallery, offers a closer look at the pictures Lieberman displays during the interview.
Overall
As Blue Sunshine would have it, all those naked, mud-spattered freakniks at Woodstock might have been better off if they had just eaten the brown acid after all.
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